


Hating This

by CampionSayn



Series: A Little Less Blood [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Animated Series, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Depression, Fix-It, For Want of a Nail, Harley finally leaving Joker, Multi, Post-Nervous Breakdown, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 15:09:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 35
Words: 72,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7646035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CampionSayn/pseuds/CampionSayn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of various one-shots based off of the, oh, so popular "What If…" Harley ever left Joker and got her old job back? Be warned, the time stream might not always line up, some shots might not have anything to do with the other and Harley isn't in love. Originally posted on FFdotnet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Here I Stand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Twilight_Shadow_Songs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twilight_Shadow_Songs/gifts).



_-:-_  
Style is knowing who you are,  
what you want to say,  
and not giving a damn.  
-Gore Vidal.

 

* * *

  
  
The door to single person therapy opened with a tired and somewhat commanding thud as Harley entered, this time without her stupid clipboard to take notes on. She was too angry at Bartholomew to take notes to give the little jerk. Who did he think he was to order her to get more insightful details on the Rogues? Was he really that stupid to think they were talking to her? He had the damn, fucking case file from when Croc tried to bite her—yes, bite with his teeth and claw with his bare hands to choke the life out of her—and she had to get to the medical wing to get the cut on her head sterilized and add in a few stitches to be covered with a butterfly band-aid!  
  
No. If he wanted their secrets, he could figure it out for himself. His therapy with them was close to useless, so she would try something different today.  
  
Sitting on the damned too soft and too damn stuffy chair she was required to sit in to oversee the patients, she listened to the clock tick on the wall, passing the seconds like money at a toll as she crossed her legs and tried not to pick at the stitches just cresting the bangs on her forehead. Damn, that was itchy…  
  
Just as her butt was starting to contour to the shape of the seat, the door opened up and in walked two guards, each at either side of Edward Nygma like gargoyles about a painted with spray paint, but still relatively sightly stone angel. Eddie didn’t look very happy, not with the slight limp he had going on with one of his legs and his hands bound in handcuffs—procedure, hah—but he kept up his air of being better than either of the two men pushing him onward. Harley had sat up eloquently to wave ‘Hi’ like before when the others didn’t hate her (much) but remembered herself and just tried to look less irritated with the world in general as one of the guards unlocked Eddie’s chains and the other looked to Harley.  
  
He, as well as all of the guards and Arkham staff in general, still got this look across their faces when they were supposed to talk to her. Somewhere between fear, being confused about why she was welcomed back as a doctor and, well, wondering (if the situation arose) if they should run away from the dainty woman they and if they were built and fit enough to hold the door and lock it before she stabbed them with her ball-point pen. The bastards.  
  
“Just, um, call us when you’re done with this one, doc.”  
  
_This one_. She would have to have a word with Leland about the more muscled and less matriculated staff using the patients’ names. Maybe then there would be less of a reason for the Rogues to fantasize about ruining the guards if they’d treat the patients like human beings.  
  
“Thank you,” Harley replied, stone faced and adding on a smile that got them out the door much faster.  
  
When she and Eddie were left alone—him in the other chair that lay down low like a bed, but tilted up enough so he could look at her without snapping his neck with a cramp—an awkward and uncomfortable silence descended upon the room. A black hole of something like hatred radiated off of Eddie and a well of substantial guilt settled into Harley like the feeling of being about to vomit, but not quite there yet.  
  
“I can’t believe they expect me to talk to you,” Eddie finally spoke up, never one to stay quiet for long in therapy as the rooms and the doctors—even if the doctor was Harley—made him extremely uncomfortable.  
  
Harley, despite promising herself that she wouldn’t take offense to anything the redhead said to her, folded her arms across her chest and leaned backwards into her chair with a huff. Some of the air from inside the leather of her seat slowly squeezed out and she moved further into it like it was a big mushroom and she was Alice of Wonderland.  
  
“Well, Eddie,” she replied, not having enough energy to be really, really mad at him, so her voice came out sort of childish, “Would you prefer to go back with Bartholomew and his depriving you of your mind games? Personally I think he only took away your cross-word puzzles last week because you mouthed off to him about…whatever you, Jervis and Professor Crane were talking about at lunch.”  
  
Eddie gave her a glare, probably a little put off by the fact that she sounded angrier with him than he did with her, “At least Bartholomew can offer somewhat stimulating, if not altogether wrong, viewpoints on my so-called condition.”  
  
“Funny, last time we spoke, I recall you calling him a no-talent hack without a scintilla of showing any signs of getting closer to reaching out to you.”  
  
At this point, he had taken from lying completely back in his seat, to sitting, feet firmly on the floor and both hands clutching his knees. She had brought her legs upwards, Indian style and had a smug look on her face.  
  
“Why are you here, Harleen?”  
  
The way he put emphasis on the name only her mother had really called her, which after sneaking into her and a few other Rogues records in the archives room last week—the reason he was limping around, compliments of the captain of the guard, oaf that he was—he knew for a fact she hated, he held back a smug smile of his own when her face turned sour. If she was still with the Rogues, she might have slugged his arm like the tomboy she was.  
  
“Well, for one reason, I hate Metropolis so I couldn’t move there,” she began, shrugging and bringing one hand up to her breast pocket to bring out what Bartholomew told her specifically not to give the Prince of Puzzles, “For another reason, I needed to eat and nobody else would hire me—and don’t tell me Pengy would have, because I asked and he told me to do various things I haven’t ever heard him say and actually made me laugh a little—and for the last reason I will divulge this session,”  
  
The objects she had grabbed from her pocket were brought to light and she plopped them into Eddie’s lap. Half a page from the Sunday paper she had torn out, folded neatly in a little square and a freshly sharpened—yes, sharpened, as in, the piece of lead sticking out at the end had pricked her finger earlier that day, despite the whole piece of wood being only the length of her middle finger—pencil, were now his possession and she cherished his look of utter astonishment that happened no longer than two seconds.  
  
“I just love pissing off Bartholomew. Leland’s a sweetheart worth paying attention to, but I won’t lie about Bartholomew’s methods being a tad flawed. He’s well intentioned, but, well…you’ve been treated by him for something like five months and you hate his guts. That tells me a little something about what he says I can and can’t do.”  
  
Eddie pretended not to pay any attention to the woman as he picked up the pencil and held it up towards the lamp attached to the ceiling. He rubbed his thumb nail against it twice so it wouldn’t punch a hole through the cross-word.  
  
“You realize they don’t give me pens and pencils for a reason, right?”  
  
Harley rolled her eyes and tried to resituate in her chair to a more comfortable position. A position that she couldn’t find.  
  
“Oh, what, you’re going to stab me? Come off it, Eddie, you hate blood and threw up the last time you cut your hand trying to make a sandwich.”  
  
“I did _not_ throw up!”  
  
“Yeah-huh! I was there; I had to clean up your puke with the bits of hamburger in it while Jervis tried to give you rubbing alcohol and bandages.”  
  
Eddie just sat there a moment, cringing in remembrance, “You are so disgustingly vulgar.”  
  
“Yeah,” she smiled, exasperated with the Indian style position, and flopped her legs over one of the chair’s arms. It reminded Eddie of that time when all of the Arkham inmates had performed a trial with Batman and she had to take the stand before Janet what’s-her-name.  
  
Eddie said nothing more as she got comfortable and, like a man possessed, he started writing in the letters in the boxes they belong to and answer questions not completely worthy of his time—Harley guessed—but it was the best he’d had in a while so he would take what he could get. Harley didn’t coax him to say anything and just observed the way his eyes traveled over the questions to find the answers and watched from the wrong side as he jotted down the answers he could get. She had already done that one at home on a piece of scrap paper and had gotten everything but the very last three answers that would have given away the theme to the crossword. Even if he didn’t talk to her for the whole session, she could still think of it as a won situation. If he got all of the answers, then he could feel accomplished before going back to his cell and she could see why she had failed on the scrap paper.

 


	2. Erotic Garbage

_-:-_  
Who is to say, We won’t stay together?  
Who is to say, We aren’t getting stronger?  
-Stand Up Boy.

 

* * *

  
  
The scent of faded cleaning supplies and the sight of medical equipment being taken away. The neighbor that lived above Harley had died in his sleep after a year-long bout of terminal Leukemia, having taken to his fifty year stayed apartment for hospice care. Harley had watched the hired help of the man’s family—a small flock of three brothers, all very tired and worn after the nice old man had died—take the man’s body to the waiting medical van that would take what was left of the corpse to the morgue and then the incinerator. Following the body, the blonde woman—sipping from her large cup of coffee and binding her terrycloth robe tighter to ward off the morning air seeping in from where she watched out her open window—were some cleaning people.  
  
A flash of white and grey with scribbles and tears. The cleaners had dragged out exactly two large black plastic bags of something that shifted and rustled in the packaging like sequins against thick dressing gown one would wear to the prom in high school. One of the bags had a small tear in it and as it was set against the dumpster with its twin, a little slip of paper tumbled out and unfurled against the stark black pavement.  
  
Alice walks down the Rabbit Hole with nobody to stop her. Curiosity got the best of the blonde woman and, as soon as the street was clear in that very early morning with the sun yet to actually rise and everything in the sky and air a sort of melted painting of fog and Dali Llama grey, she set her coffee on the coffee table where the hyenas were sleeping—not awake at all with it being, as her neighbors with the purple hair and piercings would call ‘Six in the Fucking morning’, Harley slipped out of her apartment, overly large slippers clapping against every step she took down the staircase from her apartment. It was a foolish thing too often to give into her more undesirable nature, but sometimes it pointed her in the right direction, rather than that which would have been perfect in OZ for the Wicked Witch of the West _(with no offense meant to the people in the apartment on the other side of her building who actually listened to the music from the new Broadway musical like it was a religious ceremony)_.  
  
Chill in the air and an inclination of diving into white. As Harley walked out of the building and down the steps, making sure that her key to the apartment was inside her terrycloth pocket and jingled with the keychain that she had attached and silver bells fit for reindeer antlers so she wouldn’t have to buzz on her neighbors’ buttons, or worse, have to climb up the fire-escape on the wrong side of the building, she trotted over to the piece of paper that had fallen out of the other bags. If she were to start being one of those dumpster divers that really annoyed her in the later hours of the night—often waking her up and having her think it was one of the Rogues trying to get in through her windows—she would want to see just what she was saving from the horrors of being crushed into a tiny piece of a cube to be stacked in with other cubes at the city dump, whereupon it would be loaded onto a barge that would likely flow to Virginia or, even more unsightly, Jersey.  
  
A hand that is facing a ceiling that isn’t there, two legs interlocked to keep steady, neither breasts nor lower regions of the most sacred parts of the body truly showing. Blue eyes widened at the sight of a man and a woman on the wrinkled piece of paper in an act of the most carnal; his lips attached to hers and both looking lovingly at the other, her on his lap.  
  
Hesitant reaching for the bags next to the large dumpster, fingers clutching the bound tops. Harley folded up the piece of paper and put it in her pocket with the key. She opened both of the bags and found hundreds of other scraps of paper with similar characteristics of the first paper. Some were colored and painted on, some had different configurations, the papers and textures were all multi-cultural, as well as the inks and charcoal.  
  
“Score.”

* * *

 

Jonathan Crane blinked in a sort of relative sync as the guards on either side of him as they all looked into the actually very active room of his (snort) therapist.  
  
Since the last time he had come there the week before—which included an abysmal session of awkward silence with him glaring condescendingly at her and herself trying very hard to talk like Leland did, with mixed in bits of apologetic glances—Harley had apparently decided that she hated her desk and the chair she had to sit in during sessions. She had moved the desk up to the far wall, removed all of the drawers to put in candy, paper and some other things where the square holes were; bumper stickers that read things like “The Abortion Issue Does Not Belong on the Back of a Car” and “Yes, I Have a Great Ass, Stop Looking At It, You Lech” and “Oh, Hi, Bartholomew. Some of These ARE For You Specifically”—obviously, most were custom-made—were pasted on every fine inch of the piece of furniture. The blonde had taken the drawers and nailed them to the wall facing the windows with the most light and Jonathan could see dirt inside the bottom three with tiny, newly potted flowers just peeking out of the soil; the top three seemed to hold yellowed, wrinkly paper with sort of scribbling the Master of Fear couldn’t see.  
  
Harley sat on her now not-so-fluffy chair, legs crossed Indian style—and when Jonathan said not-so-fluffy, he said it in reference to the fact that there was duct tape covering up the tears she had inflicted upon the thing to take out the down or whatever that puffed it up, making it seem emaciated in comparison to last week—with two black plastic bags on either side of the chair. There was a pile of papers all crinkled or balled up on the coffee table (the round one that rightfully belonged in Leland’s office to hold water) in front of her that she was going through and she didn’t even glance up as she addressed the guards.  
  
“Yes, hello boys,” she waved absently, unfurling another curled up paper, using the edge of the coffee table to smooth it out as though it were a dollar bill for the vending machine, “Just take off his cuffs and sit him down. I’ll call you when the session is over; thanks much.”  
  
As the guards did as instructed, each giving Crane a warning glance—that he ignored—Jonathan noted that she was wearing a sort of Hippie long-sleeved, bowl-necked orange shirt and Cappuccino colored jeans that had patches on the kneecaps, allowing him to see her skin. She had all the appearance of a teenager—especially with her sporting an up-do featuring chopsticks.  
  
Harley scrutinized the paper for a few more minutes—complete, and completely ignoring Jonathan—before finally sighing and put it on top of an already flattened set of papers next to the scrunched up ones sitting almost unflatteringly in view to be fixed.  
  
Huh, ironic.  
  
She placed her fist under her chin and looked at Jonathan, not looking angry or trying too hard, but as she did when they were still on the same side of the fence and he tolerated her blather, “So are you going to talk to me this time around or no?”  
  
He opened his mouth to snark, but she interrupted him by holding up her pointer finger, “And if you say something along the lines of ‘no’, then you can help me go through this pile of my dead upstairs neighbor’s erotic artwork that I intent to either keep around the office, publish for the world, or keep in my apartment for until I finally decide to get a new boyfriend or a battery operated device.”  
  
Jonathan had never blushed so hard or kept himself from speaking at all since he had been in junior high.   
  
The clock on the wall—a new one, a new something she had brought over from…somewhere in another dimension, probably—with the time of the year, the season and the actual time (God help her when Jervis came to see her) ticked, ticked, ticked for a good thirty seconds before The Scarecrow responded, much more meek and broken in breath than he would have liked to sound, _ever_ , “I’ll talk.”  
  
“Thank you,” she chirped, smiling much more pleasantly than she ever had when she was tolerating the abuse heaped on her by the white skinned, godless bastard in the padded cell at the other end of the asylum stuck in solitary for trying to escape.  
  
It was nice. He shouldn’t think so as she took the coffee table and placed it next to the side of her desk, grabbing a pair of candy bars as well; tossing one to the Master of Fear before taking the open black bags and moving them behind her own—mutilated—chair; hiding what was obviously making him uncomfortable.  
  
The candy bar she gave him was light chocolate with white chocolate swirls. Just like he liked it.  
  
He didn’t smile at her as she started talking, but he at least started eating the candy as she popped in a piece of her—Green Tea Nibbles—own, “So, I heard from Bartholomew that you’ve been trying to help out Jervis and he’s been talking less about Wonderland and more about things like Fall of the House of Usher, or whatever. Is it true?”  
  
A pigeon perched on the sill outside of the closest barred window, the chocolate melted along the tip of Jonathan’s tongue, “Well, Bartholomew’s opinions on Jervis are useless, and God knows how twitchy Hatter is around the man.”  
  
“So…that’s a yes?”  
  
“Yes, my child, that’s a yes.”  
  
“Good.”  
  


 


	3. Jervis is a Flower

_-:-_  
Blow a kiss, make a wish…  
…Make a wish…  
See, that part, I always forget, that part…  
-Human Trafficking.

 

* * *

  
  
_Not high heels, but flats that clicked better than heels in the color of Rose Red. The strappy sandals on her feet, looking from her seat on a bar stool, were to Harley a little…so not like her. Whatever had possessed her to buy them was lost on her while looking at how they would not increase her height and cause men to watch her ass like a dog would a fresh steak, but would certainly cause her to look a lot younger than she did. They also looked ridiculous while only wearing her loose white pantsuit with the diagonal stripes that made her look like a female Beetlejuice in the middle of brunch at the farthest corner of the Iceberg Lounge drinking orange juice…_

* * *

  
“… _I’m a little teapot, short and stout. This is my handle, this is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout: Tip me over and pour me out_ …”

  
Jervis Tetch was actually _clinging_ to one of the guards that had picked him up from his cell, eyes wide and afraid as the other guard—with equally round and reactive eyes and facial expression—made to open the door to Harley’s therapy office. The keys were shaking in the large man’s hands.  
  
“You know, I’m feeling a little hot today; maybe you two gentlemen should take me to the infirmary instead. I think Dr. Quinzel might be busy, actually, so we could just-“  
  
The guard he was holding pushed him into the now open door and followed him inside to unchain his arms and legs, the good, blonde woman sitting cross-legged atop her mutilated desk, glaring at the steaming teapot and the one cup of tea in front of her, it’s twin sitting next to the teapot placed on her coffee table within arm’s length of where Jervis would sit on the couch.   
  
Once the two blondes were left alone, the lock in the door clicking and dreadful silence pervading the atmosphere, Harley finally looked up from the cup of tea at Jervis, still frowning. He noted absently that a frown did not look good on her and was actually worse than her manic smiling when she was still with Joker.   
  
“Please have some tea, Hatty,” she offered, taking a cube of sugar from the small pyramid of them in the palm of her hand to chuck it into her own cup; it made a little splash and she didn’t try to drink any of it as she dropped in another cube before the other one disintegrated, “I think at least one of us should drink it. I thought you liked this stuff because it had caffeine in it?”  
  
The shy blonde man accepted her invitation to tea, eagerly pouring himself a cup as he wasn’t generally allowed tea by most—if not all—of the other doctors and hadn’t had any since he’d been dragged back to Arkham a week ago, “Much thanks, my dear. It does a body good to have some tea for the noon hour.”  
  
His cheerfulness seemed to make her more irritated at the cup in front of her and she dropped the entire handful of sugar into the liquid. It turned into a tanned-yellow lump of semi-solid and Jervis immediately shut his mouth and declined putting sugar into his own tea. He just sipped from the heated brew and was glad to find that she had remembered he liked Earl Gray.  
  
“This has no caffeine and I have a hangover,” Harley started again, unwinding her foot and used it to push the cup to the furthest end of her desk like it was an ugly, dirty sock, “Please, answer why the hell you like that swill so much.”  
  
Jervis wanted to tell her that such language wasn’t respectable for a lady to use, but given that she had black rings under her eyes and her bangs were hanging from the headband she was wearing, all of which making her look like a train wreck, he declined and swallowed a mouthful of his tea, “Um, well, I never understood why Americans liked coffee so much, what with it being the cause of a lot of health problems, not to mention the taste, so I guess the answer to why you prefer that to tea is the same reason I prefer tea to coffee. Plus, I was raised on it, so, obviously, I would like it better than that black garbage.”  
  
Harley growled, but left alone the teasing of his preferences. Jervis was grateful and took another sip of the well made brew.  
  
“I talked to your Alice yesterday at Penguin’s lounge.”  
  
…And then the well made brew made a way painfully through his nostrils.   
  
He chortled a couple of times before looking up to find that the gymnast was standing before him with a white handkerchief; an object he gladly took and used readily to clear his sinuses. She looked less than amused that he had dropped his teacup on her carpet—a lovely thing that was all white fuzz with black spots in all sizes—but didn’t say anything as she picked it up with the saucer and put it back on the table across from him, taking her seat at her disgustingly vile and wrecked chair. She eyed the patchy brown spot on the rug his tea had made with minor consideration.  
  
When he could take in air without it burning, Jervis looked across at the woman—who was younger than him—and gave her a wide-eyed look of unbound curiosity to be associated with Cheshire Cats and a fat Duchess.  
  
“You saw Alice? Really?”  
  
“Yes, Hatty, I saw the blondie. I don’t quite understand your fixation with her, but I did talk with her about you. Actually, I set up meeting with her for the express purpose of talking about you and her and her boyfriend-person.”  
  
The Mad Hatter didn’t seem to like the mention of the brunette man Alice was currently enthralled with, but remained intent on asking Harley about the visit.  
  
“What did you two talk about?”  
  
“I told you, we talked about you.”  
  
“Yes,” Jervis wheedled, not at all noticing that her smile had re-appeared in his leaning over his knees, “But what about?”  
  
“Mostly why she didn’t ask you out and why she’s dating a man with the I.Q. that makes him rather, well, stupid.”  
  
Okay, Jervis wasn’t really certain he’d like the answer to his next question, but he asked anyway, despite common sense, “You asked her why she never made advances toward me?”  
  
“Advancing is a strong word usually associated with guys, Jervis,” Harley held up a finger, correcting him, “Hit on might be a better way to put it. Or displayed interest. Whatever floats your boat.”  
  
“What did she say to that?” The blonde tried, gritting his teeth as she looked rather interested more in the carpet stain than the conversation. Good lord, she was acting like she used to in Joker’s employ.  
  
“Oh, well, she didn’t really have an answer to that. I gave her some of my theories why, but they just seemed to make her kinda absent-minded and we cut the meeting short. Sorry, Hatty.”  
  
A better part of him that had come into play the moment he had started seeing the other Rogues more as friends than any he had ever had were pricking at his brain, warning him against his next line of questioning liked a lighthouse warning a boat away from a cliff, but his curiosity was too much. He didn’t like the word ‘theory’ in reference and consideration to himself.  
  
“You have theories about me?”  
  
“Of course, we used to sometimes share the same hideout when Mista—“ she snapped her teeth onto her tongue like an alligator bite, pausing and drawing blood that he could see lining her teeth, “ **Joker** , was still here in Arkham. Why wouldn’t I think up reasons why a nice girl like that would reject a nice guy like you?”  
  
He tweedled his thumbs, trying to not look at the blood on her teeth or flinch when he saw her suck in breathe that put pressure on the wound along her tongue and would make more blood well up inside her mouth.   
  
“What were some of your theories?”  
  
She didn’t blink as she answered, pulling a tissue from a Kleenex box on the end of the table and put it to her tongue, “Oh, just one. I thought she might have come to the conclusion that you were gay.”  
  
Jervis found his jaw hinged open wide and absently counted three perfect red diamond shapes Harley’s blood made on the tissue as she pulled it away.

 

 


	4. Coffee and Mercury

_-:-_  
It’s only when the evening comes around  
and husband says, just as he always says,  
“Tomorrow morning, I shall have your head,”  
when Dunyazade, her sister, asks, “But please,  
what of Aladdin?” only then, she knows…  
-Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things.

 

* * *

  
  
A cup on its side with nothing on the inside. The lock to the espresso machine that only requires three quarters (preferable clean and without rust) has been picked and the monolithic black and blue door with the bland word of ‘ _Caffeine’_ printed on the front for all the employees of Arkham to use while on lunch break hangs open rather like one of the secret passageways in the game Clue. The legs that can be seen from under the overhanging door are thin and clean and not wearing tights with high heels—never ever, ever heels—but rather just a pair of knee-high black stockings and brown boots without laces.  
  
Joan Leland, one of the better doctors of the asylum—some would say the best—allowed the image to sink in before the reality of not being able to get her favorite coffee became more paramount to why Harley was working on the machine’s guts. That was the purpose of having a janitor on staff.  
  
Hand on the door feels cold to the touch. Joan pulled the machine door a little wider and it allowed her the ability to take in the sight of Harley standing before the inside of the accursed machine with a screwdriver dangling in between her teeth, just in her red button-up with the sleeves bunched up her arms and the pony-tail she wore now-a-days unfastened and the band around her wrist. Her hair was as manic as it used to be, as well as there being an unsightly brown coffee stain on the untucked right side of her shirt near the hip falling from the band of her black skirt.  
  
“Harley, what are you doing?”  
  
Blue eyes fastened and straight ahead. Harley didn’t turn to look at Joan, but she did take the screwdriver from her teeth to diddle with the screw that Joan was fairly certain kept the powder box for the espresso filter closed.  
  
“This piece of garbage,” the blonde woman growled out between her teeth and through her cherry red lips, “Has stolen my quarters for the third time today. I let it go the first two times because the guy that’s supposed to fix it said he would be back and I could get my coffee then. That was five hours ago, he’s still not here, and it would just go so much faster if I did it myself.”  
  
Dark silk and mahogany brown. Leland raised a brow at the woman as she opened the powder box, using her little hands to bring it out and hold it up to her face, a frown marring her visage as she then put her hand inside the box, fished around and then brought out a handful of brown gunk that Joan realized must have been the sugar and flavoring powder that got caught in the filter and hadn’t been cleaned out in a while.  
  
“I wasn’t aware you knew how to open and work a vending machine.”  
  
Prayer beads of Al Wasi’ (The All-Embracing), Al Hakim (The Wise) and Ash Shahid (The Witness) in the colors of magenta, a sort of pearly white and silt grey. The long necklace that Harley was wearing slinked from out of her shirt as she bent at an odd angle to put back the little dispensary and she glanced between parts breaking in her yellow hair at the other doctor. Perhaps, Joan noted, she may have wanted to roll her eyes, but suppressed the urge. When Joan used to treat Harley every time the woman relapsed and had to come back to be a patient, Joan would have preened over the blonde’s restraint at such a childish thing; though, now, it seemed more like Harley was being almost condescending.  
  
“This is all basically just plumbing,” Harley explained, screwdriver twisting along the ridges of her fingers and nails, making little clicks with each motion, “Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty. If I can set up and disarm a mercury switch bomb, I can certainly fix this piece of crap. Oh,” she paused, closing the vending door, before putting her cup from the counter nearby (a cute little thing that was blue with green hearts and reminded Joan a little of Jervis Tetch’s Mad Hatter ensemble) against the lever that loosed the drinks; dark brown flowing out finally and successfully, “And I just rigged the thing to only need two quarters. Don’t tell Bartholomew.”  
  
Flare of shivers, see through hairs lining up around the ridges of the shoulders like an anodyne shot right through the system. It always spooked Joan badly whenever Harley brought up activity from her former existence—if reincarnation existed, Joan was certain it didn’t exactly have to happen before and after the person died—and even more so when Harley mentioned the more dangerous aspects. Though, if the petite, hard as nails (well, now) woman could fix the coffee machine when it broke down at least once a week, Joan would let the mention of dangerous explosives go.

* * *

 

A composition of thirteen string instruments and some sort of bass drum. The same echo of a recording had been playing since lunch and Joan thanked god when it was shut off and Edward Nygma was brought into her therapy room, Joan’s legs propped up at the end of her red and gold colored, feather imprinted foot rest, her clipboard held at the ready, but her pen in hand only drawing a tiny flower at the top of where her notes on the Riddler would begin. The flower looked a little like one of Ivy’s Foxgloves in black and white print.  
  
“Good evening Mr. Nygma,” Joan greeted in her usual half-cheery manner, eyeing the guards with mild annoyance as they shoved the ginger a little harder onto the patient’s sofa for either of their liking.  
  
Leaving of two giants not truly fit to wear the uniform of guards. When the two men left the room, Joan was sure to give the one who had been working in the asylum the longest—she didn’t quite know his name until it came to her when she had to yell at him for use of excessive force on the patients—a sour look and a private promise to give his ear a chewing after this session.  
  
Light bruising along the base of the wrists that were just starting to pink up. Eddie rubbed at the lines of the shackles the guards had removed from him just before leaving, eyeing the vile things laid out along the back counter of the room where Joan kept some tea packets and sugar, as well as a silver teapot for when one of the other doctors transferred Jervis to her service if he started spouting off quotes from Wonderland and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The chains and shackles really were unsightly, but Joan couldn’t just remove them from the room. Instead, she cleared her throat and Eddie turned back to look at her. He seemed less downtrodden than the last time she had seen him.  
  
“Dr. Leland,” Eddie greeted as well, making himself comfortable with his arms brought behind his head like a pillow and his legs crossing, “How’s your day going so far?”  
  
A schoolgirl’s smile, but an old maid’s intelligence. Joan was used to this by now; Eddie asking her questions before she did him, but she could work around it. It would be better if the lunch he’d had was better—seeing as the staff ate the same things as the convicts to prove it wasn’t poison, that day being presented with stuffed potatoes and bacon bits with smoked ham that was a little too thick (like a tire), she knew it wasn’t his cup of tea—but he did seem chipper. She’d have to answer his questions and hope for the best.  
  
“Well enough, Edward. The lounge coffee machine backed up again, but it got fixed. Other than that, there’s not much to say about my day.”  
  
“Ah, those over paid, half-wit slobs finally did their jobs. That’s nice.”  
  
Derogatory comments on beings seen as lesser organisms. Leland couldn’t help but agree with Eddie’s opinion of the men who got paid much too much for _not_ doing their jobs, but couldn’t say much on the subject unless it lead Edward to realize that she shared the same opinion he did. Rather, she would provide him a source of equal ground commentary and hope it would lead the session in a desired direction.  
  
“No,” she corrected the man who liked green almost as much as Ivy but in a different capacity, “Actually, Harley fixed it. Said it was much less difficult than deactivating a mercury switch bomb. I could see that, kinda.”  
  
Faded crests in the sand on the beach. The smile that Eddie had been sporting vanished at the mention of the blonde PHD and the little twitch his foot had been participating in ceased its movement. His intelligent and clever eyes dimmed and settled on the exotically dark woman before him. His curiosity was always his problem and he opened his mouth for questions.  
  
Silence.  
  
Waiting with the click of the clock on the wall, Joan noted the extreme hesitation Eddie didn’t usually exhibit. Grounds to cover in his psyche based on his feelings was stacked and treacherous to those who had never interviewed him before, but Joan jumped into it. A curious hare running into a field of scented plants that fogged the senses and made maneuvering about almost impossible.  
  
“You know, I haven’t asked any of the other patients about how they feel about Dr. Quinzel rejoining the asylum staff. I think maybe my best shot at getting on honest answer is from you or maybe Professor Crane, but you’ll probably give me less grief over even asking.”  
  
Downy fluff falling off the skin of a fledgling bird as newer, stronger feathers come in. Eddie’s lips curved into a frown and he changed positions so he was sitting up, elbows bracing his knees so his hands could cradle his chin, his right upper canine snipping at the skin inside his cheek. His mood was deflating from its sunny disposition very quickly and Joan set the clipboard to the side of the chair, hands bracing the arms.  
  
“It must be quite a change, her being here and not in a cell. I’d understand if you’re angry at her, but I was wondering why the other patients have been taking such cruel actions with her? Mister Jones bit her, after all, and Miss Isley has been rather…cruel in her sessions with Harley-“  
  
“We’re just in shock.”  
  
A hollow whisper inside the confines of an empty willow tree. Joan tilted her head gently to the right side, short brown hair in her gauze-gray headband tilting with her like willow wisps.  
  
“I’m sorry?”  
  
“I mean, we’re all just trying to adjust to the fact that she actually left Joker,” Eddie explained in a condescending tone much like Penguin did when he was out on parole, “And she’s working here again. It would be funny if we weren’t all so… freaked out by it.”  
  
“So,” Joan trailed off, looking at a spot on the ceiling that looked like a puddle thanks to the broken piping in the men’s lavatory on the floor above, “You’re just treating her like garbage because she’s working here again?”  
  
Shrug. “Hey, I don’t care much one way or another. I’m not that close to her.”  
  
Steepled fingers under the chin similar to the man before her. Joan considered this, but it was _still_ distressing in the realization that Harley would probably be suffering a lot more thanks to this line of thinking. She quietly hoped that Eddie would change his mind and the others would as well.

 


	5. Miserable and Lonely

_-:-_  
…he had something within him of the wolf that recaptures its prey and the dog that finds its master again.  
-Les Miserables.

 

* * *

  
  
He is not terrified. Jonathan Crane looked at the pitiful looking blonde with the blackened right eye and plainly visible scratches along the rest of her face and what of her arms he could see with her blue button-up shirt sleeves rolled up, his own eyes noting how Croc had decided to use much more subtle measures yesterday in the lunch room when he had gotten free from those idiot guards again. She was frowning at him but the frown was not as foolish and stupid as the other doctors; like they were his parents.  
  
“Did one of you guys pay Croc to beat the crap out of me?”  
  
He is not terrified. The Scarecrow gave her an affronted look, as if to say pointedly that she knew better. And she did, for heaven’s sake, she knew that they—being most of the other Rogues—preferred to take the fates of others into their own hands and didn’t waste money paying each other to do their own dirty work. That was Joker’s occasional MO, but not often.  
  
“No, Harleen,” he emphasizes her name with venom, earning a further glare from where she’s sitting on the back of her mutilated chair, legs dangling like a puppet on a bench, “Why would you ask such a stupid question?”  
  
She is raging inside. She brought a hand up to the most prominent scratch—caused almost perversely by the green man’s middle finger when he’d smashed her head into a wall and then tossed her so she landed on her back and her skull had bounced painfully on the cement floor—that was a grossly delicate magenta red from minor infection that curved from below her left eye to the curve under her jaw. Her pointer finger traced its outline and the skin at the edges parted enough that the skinny, ruddy haired professor flinched internally at seeing puss under the pressure of her ministrations.  
  
“Gee, I don’t know,” she sneered rather convincingly at the much older Rogue, whom she still respected, much to his feelings of confusion and minor curiosity, “Even when I was roaming around under Joker’s orders, I don’t recall ever doing anything that would cause him to get this petulantly violent. Like a child, I might add.”  
  
He is not worried about the way she’s eyeing him like dead meat. Jonathan cleared his throat, “Perhaps it has something to do with your recent betrayal and his feeling a little miffed-“  
  
“He didn’t like me when I was wearing skin tight red and black, I sincerely doubt he’s doing this because of ‘hurt feelings’ when the only thing he used to do when I was around was check out my ass. So, who goaded him into doing it? Was it Red? Did she promise him money; ‘cause I know he wouldn’t beat me up just so she’d sleep with him when she’s poisonous! Or did my loving, caring ex give him incentive to make me suffer even more? Joker would certainly get a kick out of busting out and into the security camera hub just to snatch a copy of the event and then eat a bowl of popcorn while laughing at it in some hidey-hole.”  
  
He is not terrified of her. Jonathan brought his arms before his chest in a strong guard maneuver of maintaining terrain on an issue that had not a leg to stand on. He understood how she could be frustrated with him—though he’d never cut her any slack now that she was to observe and analyze him, Master of Fear—and the rest of the inmates when it was they who had been bitching her to reform and leave Joker for something like seven years, and she probably felt more betrayed than they did now that she had hopped the fence south of the border and were treating her like something less than even what she used to be. But, some code among the others prevented him in revealing this. He was suffering in the asylum, the same as all the others, and she was the closest thing they had to relief of frustration. He was not inclined to help her to any degree.  
  
She is raging inside…and hurting. The frown she had been giving Jonathan since he had entered the room softened and crackled and crumbled when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to help her. A gusty, nightingale’s sigh left her and she bent just enough so she slithered like a snake down the back of her chair and slouched into a sitting position, legs wide out in front of her and arms and hands just hardly clutching the arms of the chair; boneless in her entirety.  
  
“Could you at least tell me which guard keeps letting him go and why? I don’t have much in insurance and going to the ER every time Waylon has a brawl with me is getting expensive. I’ll give you a present.”  
  
He is never going to be terrified of her again. The way she made the offer in sing-song and desperation pulled at something in him so he had to change position, one knee coming to perch atop the other and his arms behind him so in that he was leaning away from the pathetic spectacle of the raggedy woman in stitches before him. She added a bit more of her accent into the mix and it grated his mood just enough. If asked why he gave in, he would tell the others it was because she was whining like a brat and it would be true enough once he was done with the session in twenty minutes.  
  
“What sort of…present, child?”  
  
She is just hurting. Harley lolled her head to the side just enough that he could see the bits of three of Croc’s teeth marks when he’d held her down to rip her throat and she’d barely kept him from doing it with outstretched legs and years of awkward gymnast positions under her belt with her underneath his large, scaled mass. Jonathan kept from allowing pity to overtake him, but mentally noted that it might be better for all of them if Croc stopped doing this once Bane was caught again. Jonathan might be able to get them to knock each other out with some proper wording and a well-timed incident in the lunch room. Of her own volition, Harley brought both her hands underneath the cushion she was sitting on and, after a show of looking for something with just her sense of touch, she pulled out a book.   
  
He was correct. There was no terror to be had in this. She showed off the book by tossing it at him, him barely catching it, and finding it to be most of the completed work of Poe and some other dark novelists with a thing for incest and misery.  
  
She looked absolutely miserable.

 


	6. Don't Get Too Close

_-:-_  
Small Pang of Regret…Once his duty is done, he swims happily through the air with languid movements like a fish. He is the facilitator of the future linked to the past...  
-Good Faeries and Bad Faeries.

* * *

 

  
Fins like the veils of certain Arabian princess figures in the times of the Forty Thieves; black with sheer red of the blood of broken hearts. Harley looked through the glass of the giant fish tank sitting in the middle of the ballroom adjacent restaurant and lounge that Selina had dragged her to so the cat lover could get to her date with Bruce and Harley could get wasted if she wanted to. The long-sleeved yellow dress she was wearing had thus far proved to be quite useful to gain the odd look from various people of the society benefit they were at. A sort of giant neon sign that read ‘Do Not Want Company.’  
  
Chittering of certain birds in the Rain Forest as they call for a mate. In the area thirty feet behind where Harley was drinking a champagne that tasted way too foamy for her taste, the ex-Rogue had seen and could still hear Veronica Vreeland talking with other society ladies who lunched about something tedious and stupid—something about the fall fashion gala at the Ritz or something. Harley still recalled the small episode she had experienced a few years ago with the redhead and her father’s, a-hem, military connections and, though the woman probably wouldn’t recognize her without a ludicrous amount of face paint and a costume, decided to avoid making a scene; if only to make sure that Selina’s date would go well and Harley could sneak out when Miss Kitty wasn’t looking.  
  
A somber sigh into a crowd to be swallowed up. Blue eyes wandered the crowd and finally came to rest at the bar at the far end. She moved toward the bar, doubting there would be anything to nibble on—this was a WASP oriented event—but she could always switch to a stronger drink than the pink bubbly she then downed in a single gulp, her blonde ponytail bobbing with the motion of her head.  
  
Cushions of black leather on stainless steel rods that spin clockwise if pushed correctly by a drunken individual. Sitting at the bar—her personal space free from other people for about three to four seats in either direction of the counter, everyone being out on the floor chatting or dancing to the crappy music played by the band special ordered to play low Jazz—Harley set down her glass and called over the bartender, simply requesting, “A bowl of whatever you have that’s edible and goes with a Bee Stinger, please.”  
  
A pain-stakingly trying appearance to keep away the gratitude of being ordered something easy. The bartender smiled politely at her and wandered to the back room where they kept drinks not often used by high society to get plastered, but what was often ordered in general for the place.  
  
An unwelcomed guest comes rapping at the door. No sooner was Harley left alone with her thoughts—sad and destitute as they were all about work back at the asylum—than she felt a presence beside her and the scent of heavy, expensive, disgusting cologne filled her nose and made her sneeze hard into her hand, features very displeased and disposition even more so when a voice that sounded too nasal and pompous for her taste spoke up; a hand holding a flute of similar champagne moving into her vision after the sneeze.  
  
“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a lovely young thing like you at one of Wayne’s charities,” the man drawled, perhaps a couple years older than her, though he acted much younger with how he implemented himself as Don Juan, “Pierce Chapman, pleased to make your acquaintance.”  
  
Silence in breath. Harley tried very hard to make it seem that she was trying not to gag at the presence of the man who was obviously failing to properly hit on her; she didn’t want him reeling and attracting everyone else’s curious stares, so she settled for raising a brow at him, his voice and face familiar, though she wasn’t quite sure how.  
  
“Harley, you don’t need to know my last name,” she offered, glad that the bartender came back with her very large drink and a small bowl of itty-bitty brownies; she smiled at the much, much older man, gave him a tip—and a whopper of one at that—as she turned back to the other man, frown reclaiming its place on her lips, “Do I know you or are you just here in hopes of offering to buy me a drink, even when the place is catered and therefore free?”  
  
Forced joviality. His laughter, loud and obnoxious—nearly so much as Joker’s—caused her to take a heavy swig from her drink as it gave way to a mild annoyance in the back of her skull.  
  
“Oh, stop, you’re too much,” he grinned, somehow making him seem more stupid than he already did with that blue bowtie and matching suit that somehow put her in the mind of a story from one of Penguin’s times out of the joint, “I’m a dear friend of Veronica Vreeland’s, which is probably why I would be familiar to a gal like you. Though, you’re probably a mild friend of Wayne’s, since I can’t remember ever seeing you before.”  
  
A night light in the dark above the head that serves to exclaim familiarity or a euphemism for an idea of massive proportions. Harley took up one of the brownies and chased it down her throat with another swallow of her drink.  
  
“….Veronica and you are friends?”  
  
“Yes; and dearly so after that incident with inviting the Penguin, that stuffed capon, to one of her parties.”  
  
At that moment, the Grinch got a wonderfully, terrifically awful idea. Blue eyes blinked twice at Pierce as he continued to smile at Harley, unknowingly giving her the answer to the question that had waged her curiosity and prevented her from telling him to get lost the moment he sat down and continued to waft the smell of dead animal and laundry cleaner that called itself cologne. The frown on her face turned upwards, giving him a little hope that he was getting somewhere.  
  
Her teeth were showing.

* * *

 

 

_{Ten minutes earlier and far across the room…}_  
  
“Oh, Brucie, why don’t you ever come to the country club anymore? We’ve been missing you at the tennis matches and daddy has been wanting so badly to talk to you about the way your company is handling the experimental wing of Wayne Tech.”  
  
Similar tastes and an urge to be any place but there. Bruce Wayne kept his fake smile up, having to keep up the appearance of being interested in what Veronica Vreeland was saying; on his arm and practically inhaling her third flute glass of champagne, Selina at least had the luxury of not knowing Veronica personally, and had the good luck to actually feel free in her emotions to be bored witness, rolling her eyes upward to look at the patterns of the ceiling or the fish swimming in the tank nearby.  
  
Sheathed claws within the fold of feline reflexes. Selina looked at Bruce, her own blue eyes begging him—though begging was never a correct way to describe any of the kitty cat persuasion—to find a way to get them out of there. Or at least lose this bimbo _**PLEASE**_.  
  
“Well, Veronica, I have been rather busy with corporate mergers in the European Block recently,” Bruce explained, absently moving his arm close enough to Selina’s hip to give a shiver of a touch with the ends of his fingers so she wouldn’t be too tempted to insult Veronica like the last time she’d come as a guest to a charity. Catwoman out of her suit sighed at his absent touch and placated herself with running a hand through her black hair, untangling absent, unauthorized knots and tangles that had not been there when she’d hauled Harley out from the blonde’s apartment. Perhaps she should buy a better conditioner?  
  
“That’s hardly an excuse, Bruce,” Veronica whined, taking a small sip from her champagne, and brushing off a piece of barely there lint that clung to her designer ruffled sleeve purple dress, “That sort of thing that Lucius Fox is for; you should have more fun with your life, get out more often, mingle!”  
  
“Oh, I think he mingles quite a bit, actually,” Selina smirked, bringing her side closer to his, virtually rubbing up against his hip with her own.  
  
Fight and flight right out the parting in the grasslands; a gazelle running from a hyena. Veronica turned about before saying anything witty about Bruce not doing such things with his ex-convict in public, Bruce and Selina looking behind her as well at the sound of breaking glass and Pierce Chapman making his way over from the bar, face and tux drenched in a brisk smelling liquid, face red and angry.  
  
“Wayne, where are you?” He called out, his snobbish accent cracked in fury, head spinning around before landing on the sight of the much wealthier playboy. He made his way over to the suddenly very curious group of people, a stomp in his strike sort of that of a child in the middle of a hissy-fit.  
  
Puffy chested males in line for a match of dominance, despite one being well below the other’s standard of a challenge. Bruce remained calmly with Selina on his arm as Pierce came up to them, a half-smirk on Wayne’s mouth as Mr. Chapman ground his teeth in outrage, “Pierce, what’s the matter with you? Not enjoying the party?”  
  
“Well, I was until one of your guests decided to screech and crow about the Penguin before splashing her drink in my face—and on my new tux as well! Honestly, Wayne, one would think you’d keep better company,” though, even as the words left the stuffy man’s mouth, he eyed Selina vaguely, his hands trying to rub out the stains, the impressions of the wetness on his clothing like they would magically come out.  
  
A rising pair of ankles in high heels, flashing brilliant blue eyes, muscles besides curving to get a better look through, above, between other people in the event. Selina had a cunning grin on her face, one that showed the canine of the left side of her mouth, both arms bracing Bruce’s arm to try and balance in the shoes she had chosen for the event that were not at all proper, but certainly worked with the skin tight black dress she wore herself.  
  
“That’ll be Harley,” the brunette lassie sneered at Pierce, though quite unable to find her friend’s figure anywhere from where the man had come storming over from like an outraged priest in a condemned church flying for heaven, “I brought her with me as the ‘plus one’ allowed with the invitation given to me. She’s been so run down lately; I wanted her to have the chance of getting plastered.”  
  
A golden brown fox among pampered champion dogs, flying for its life, not at all wasting its time with being pleasant as it made its way out of the nearest exit; hardly proof that it was there, save for the trappings left in its wake. Bruce stood on his own tip-toes, finding the bar seat Pierce had come from—soaked still in drippings of the drink splashed at him—with his eyes, as well as an empty glass cup on the counter next to a half-eaten bowl of tiny brownies. He did not see any trace of Harley at all—at least, until he looked toward the doorway that lead to the parking lot; her blonde hair curried behind her in the way of flags and her yellow dress was hiked up to allow her swift escape.  
  
He would have to find a way to talk to her after she calmed down. Maybe he could swing into her place after she got home and he finished with the charity event. No use running after Cinderella when Bruce already knew where she lived.  
  
“Oh, Pierce,” Veronica scolded, so unlike herself, but still, her hands were on her hips and she looked somehow and perfectly disappointed in the other socialite, “I thought we were agreed that we wouldn’t talk about the Penguin/Opera incident anymore? It’s rude and we…”  
  
Whispered echoes and annoyance at the same instance of silent understanding. Both Bruce and Selina silently traipsed away from the other two, her arm on his again and him downing the rest of his drink, setting it on the tray of a nearby busboy so both hands were free to hold Selina and talk without anything in the way.  
  
“I didn’t think you and Harley were really talking,” Bruce said, “You barely tolerated her when she was working under Joker, I can’t imagine what would have made you bring her along tonight.”  
  
Woman’s mystery held in that place no man, scientist, poet or lover, has ever really been able to truly find or understand. Selina shrugged, a tendril of hair smoothing her shoulders.  
  
“We don’t talk. Not really. And you’re right, I can barely tolerate her even now, but,” she hesitated, “Everyone hates her so much these days and you and her kind of know each other, so I thought, hey, this seems like a safe, friendly environment she won’t be completely depressed in or get into too much trouble.”  
  
“If only I hadn’t invited Chapman…”  
  
“If only all these other people weren’t _jerks_.”

 


	7. Vending Machines

_-:-_  
Osuritta: The Hiding One: Only really an annoyance to human males (she never pesters the females, ever, ever) she hides things in the cupboard or fridge that causes the male to be frustrated. When his wife comes to see what he’s looking for, Osuritta puts it right out front.  
-Brian Fraud and Ari Berk: Goblins.

 

* * *

  
  
“Okay, this cannot be legal.”  
  
Ignoring Bartholomew’s horribly obnoxious voice—not a voice obnoxious to the rest of the world, just to the people that had him as their doctor for more than a year—Harley continued to keep Bud’s jaw open so she could stuff the horse-pill the vet had given for him down his throat before his paralyzed attack died down and he got up and awake enough to chase the head of the Arkham psychiatric board out of her office. Beside her, on the other doggie bed she had dragged in that morning, Lou looked at the aged man with a tilted head. The way he kept his hands on his hips made him look like the angry redhead woman their ‘Mommy’ used to spend time with.  
  
“It is legal, boss-man,” Harley ground out, Bud giving no resistance as she succeeded in her endeavor, fingers spread over his sharp teeth in an awkward attempt to keep his whole mouth open as her other hand massaged the animal’s throat and he swallowed the pill to had lathered in pancake syrup so it went down easier, “I applied to own them the minute I left Arkham. Quite frankly, the people at the zoo who were holding them were glad to have them taken. Isn’t that right Lou?”  
  
The sedate hyena that was not in the throws of stillness gave a sound that was not quite a whine and not quite a yip but certainly enough to get the other psychiatrist to take a step away from where Harley sat, smiling at the things.   
  
“Okay,” Bartholomew answered, taking another step back and fiddling with his tie, huffy, “But they’re not supposed to be _here_. They might make the patients uncomfortable.”  
  
“Leland and the other docs are okay with it,” Harley stated, “Because Bud here has Lyme disease and, hey, guess what? The patients that _you_ set me up with remember my babies very well from my previous existence. Hopefully they’ll keep Waylon and Pamela from beating the crap out of me. At least until Bud’s done with his treatment.”  
  
The elder crossed him arms, glaring at the still paralyzed hyena that glared right back as much as possible. It was little wonder that the other creature didn’t attack the man, but from as much information Bartholomew could gather from this little situation and previous experiences—i.e. when Harley was still on the wrong side of the law and didn’t pretend to tolerate him like she did now—he could figure that the paralyzed creature was an extroverted aggressor like the Joker and the other one was an introverted sweetheart that seemed friendly and only got mean when he was either told or when faced with danger. His logical mind figured that they would probably be as useful as pet therapy in prison but he was obstinate and had another question before he would likely walk out of the office in long strides of mild anger and severe annoyance at the newest addition to Arkham’s staff rather than the criminally insane the staff treated.  
  
It was what he came into the woman’s office for in the first place, anyway.  
  
“I need you to do something for me.”  
  
“You’re kidding, I’m shocked,” she sneered, sarcastic as she got up off of her knees and dusted her jeans off, giving Bud a little prod with her toe—a gentle rub that caused his tail to gently lift as much as it was able in a wagging motion—before going over to her desk to fish around for the files she had been about to do before Bud fell over like a sleeping cow in the countryside.  
  
Bartholomew let the sarcasm slide, wringing his hands together, “Yes. Well, um, you see, I really wouldn’t ask but I was hoping—maybe, that, if you’re as ethical as you say, you could maybe get Joker-“  
  
Here, at that one word, she finally focused her whole attention on him. Her terrifying blue eyes looked at him, adjusted at the full force of her extreme annoyance of his whole existence. Lou at her feet growled at the name, ears wedged backwards.  
  
She didn’t say anything, so he continued in what he would later—much later, in the evening, at home, eating dinner—realize would be his deep regret, “…He, um, he hasn’t eaten in four days and well, we wanted to not have to use drugs to get him to sleep so we could put IV fluids in him. Dr. Leland and I thought, since he did eat when you were always breaking out with him that you, perhaps, would know what he would eat and make him?”  
  
“No.”  
  
It was a flat, sharp objection and Harley hoped, silently and as she stood tall and firm, that he would leave it at that.

* * *

 

“Look at it this way,” Leland wheedled, not exactly freaked out as Lou trailed behind Harley in front of them both, but still not wanting to touch him at all, “At least Bartholomew actually came to you for help.”  
  
“Whoop-de-fucking-doo.”  
  
The door that lead to the wing made up entirely of the Batman’s Rogue Gallery—i.e. all of the patients that had a persona of a supervillain—with its electric buzz signaling down the hall that it was indeed opening thanks to the guard behind the plate glass office who’d pressed the button, widened before the two women and both Leland and Quinzel took the first step into the recently painted ward that had, since four weeks ago, taken on the visage of a house in the village of Strawberry Shortcake. Everything except for what was beyond the glass that kept the inmates inside, was Valentine Pink—Leland was in the mind of Pepto Bismol—and what the contractors had called Buttercup Yellow.   
  
It was supposed to have a calming effect on the patients, as Doctor Arkham had explained it. Harley had snorted and, when the head of the asylum was gone, told Leland that if those colors did anything but give Professor Crane massive migraines and make Jervis even more likely to quote Carrol, she would actually start listening to the elders of the staff. Since then, Crane had made thirteen requests for strong aspirin and Mr. Tetch had been driving Joan herself up the wall quoting the verses from ‘Golden Afternoon’ and smiling more than usual. It really was a wonder the blonde hadn’t sing-songed “I told you so” since the week before.  
  
Ignoring the abysmal color scheme, Harley and Joan continued on, passing by all of her old friends with Harley staring straight ahead at the single door at the end of the hall that served as a sort of solitary for new arrivals. Bolton had used it last—since then he’d been moved to another ward—and nobody had taken up residence in it since, so Harley was perfectly fine with staring at the little piece of sliding glass that served to give food to the occupant. Joan took note of every person in their cell that they walked by, Lou doing so as well, except he wagged his tail and gave little yips to each as if in greeting before moving along with his owner.   
  
Jonathan was lying on his back in bed, previously muttering dark nursery rhymes to himself, only to gently tilt his head as the two women moved along, raising a brow for only a moment before going back to, possibly, consulting dark Scarecrow. Jervis was reading, not anything to do with Carrol, but a book on anatomy, lifting his head to give Harley a mystified look, perhaps thinking ‘ _Well, what are you doing back here?_ ’ and flinched away from the hyena as he looked at the Englishman that smelled forever and always of tea even after weeks of captivity. Eddie was busy writing down something on the flyleaf of a book he’d gotten from the library, almost dropping it when he spotted Leland, completely ignoring Harley.  
  
Croc wasn’t in his cell, seeing as he was in the activity room that served as a gym, thank god. Bane was at large in the city or some other place. Two-Face was also at large, though the staff had heard on the news that he’d been spotted in the high rent district a few hours ago by the police telling them that they might want to set up his cell in case he came in that night. Arnold Wesker sat chatting with Scarface—now decked out in a gray jumpsuit, compliments of Harley when she’d fixed him a few days before—only looking up for a moment at the flash of Harley’s blonde hair. The shy man gave Leland a reluctant smile and Harley an extremely timid wave that she, just for a second returned with a little smile and nod; Scarface crossing his arms, but not doing anything outwardly negative toward the woman who’d sewed him the new scrubs.  
  
Ivy was the last the three moved by before they had to turn down the hall and see the Joker. She, as was to be expected, looked surprised for about a blink at Harley being ten feet near any of them, but quickly moved back to tending to the rose bush she was allowed to take care of, frowning and brushing her hair to one side. The sweep of red hair was rather passive aggressive and Joan took note that Harley continued looking onward, but lost some of her sturdy momentum in the wake of the plant lover. Lou yipped at the woman twice, wagging his tail in profound joy, right up until Ivy snarled at the creature and he skittered back over to Harley.  
  
“Mongrel,” Ivy hissed under her breath and, Leland was appalled to realize, the dark skinned psychiatrist couldn’t tell if Pamela meant the hyena or Harley.  
  
Joan would make a note to take Ivy off of Harley’s service until she could figure out why the woman was acting so aggressive when she’d been the one to try for so long to get the blonde out from under Joker’s manipulative nature.  
  
Passing by the second to last cell before they were to see Joker, the one Harley had been in for the better part of the last seven years, now sterile and free of any evidence she had even been there—a sort of waking dream like that described by scholars of some of the castles of Morgan Le Fay that vanished like mist—Harley stopped to look inside the cell. She had a sad look that passed along the insides of her eyes that Joan considered, but not for long. Harley took the last five steps over to the very last cell in the hall and a face of abject and complete disdain painted her like her old white paint; her hands that had been holding a paper bag full of something or other clenched just sort of harsh enough to rip the brown binding.  
  
There Joker sat, inside his cell playing solitaire and looking not much worse for anything, save for the black eye Batman had given him before returning the clown to Arkham’s walls and a little slower than usual, as was to be expected when Bartholomew said he hadn’t eaten for four days. Four days, Harley had said while getting food she knew he would eat, might as well have been seven, considering he was so good at masking things. Still, he looked better than Joan expected and she had to suspend any thoughts of her own as the clown looked up at the women and gave one of his red-rimmed smiles.  
  
“Well, well, well,” he chortled, high voice grating on every nerve Leland had so she could only imagine what it was doing to Harley, “I was wondering who was going to try and feed me today. You get the short end of the stick, babe?”  
  
“Of course I did,” Harley ground out, Lou growling at the pale man as he stood up from sitting on the floor, happily stepping on his cards without a second thought to bridge his hands behind his back and lean forward to look at his ex-girlfriend/wife/wench/whatever with a scrutiny that Leland thought was even more repulsive than usual; as if he had the right to think anything bad of Harley when he’d made her life so miserable and she was still feeling her choices’ ill effects on herself, “Nobody else wants to try and stick you with some nice Thorazine after the last time you stabbed one of the orderlies in the viscera.”  
  
He looked like he wanted to say something else, but then Harley opened the sliding drawer that everyone used to give the patients something to eat—an ugly grey sliding metal box with springs that Joker had tried to get out and use for a weapon, but always failed—and dumped the contents of the brown paper bag inside. Joan spotted plastic in different colors and a plastic bottle like they sold milk in at the supermarket, but not much else when she slammed the drawer shut.  
  
Joker tilted comically sideways, one leg coming up like Charlie Chaplin to rest against the glass and looked into the drawer as Lou continued to gnash his teeth and the fur on the back of his neck rose up to make himself bigger, Harley taking all of her anger to crumble the brown bag into a ball, her fingernails digging into the paper like cat’s claws.  
  
“Ooooh, you remembered!” Joker smiled even more, this time like a high school jock upon the girl who did his homework for him, white hands digging into the drawer and bringing out all that had been deposited inside: vending machine food from the lounge which included organic milk, a fresh-wrapped tofu burger with eggs, those Chinese black pepper tasting health tarts that you needed to really work up an appetite for before putting it in your mouth, cheese and peanut butter crackers and a single white, sugar-free diabetic recommended Baby Girl Cake.  
  
Leland knew from the varied experience of actually buying some of that food that it was all—save for the milk and maybe the cake with it—tasteless, joyless and was the equivalent of swallowing twenty-thousand carbs and calories in one go. If Joker really ate that when he got himself out of the asylum, it was a small wonder why he wouldn’t eat the food that Arkham served which actually tasted BETTER.  
  
But, she wouldn’t get the chance to ask, since Harley—once Joker opened up the tofu burger and pretty much took a giant bite and swallowed it whole like a dog or a shark—grabbed her arm and started dragging her back the way they had come, Lou right behind them and still glaring at the man until they turned the corner.  
  
“You screwed up the crackers, though!” Joker called out when the two women just got by Eddie. Laughing malice echoed with the words as Harley stopped just before Jonathan’s cell and turned, calling backward and making the ginger master of fear almost jump out of bed and onto the floor.  
  
“Shut up and eat your damn cake!”  
  
The exit doors, when they closed, made the wing of Rogues echo with Harley stomping back to her office and Joker laughing even more.

 


	8. Leave Her Alone

_-:-_  
This is sad.  
-Poison Ivy in ‘Second Chance’ by Crispy Gypsy on deviantArt.

 

* * *

  
  
_Up until a week or so ago, Harley had been very much content to think that maybe Ivy didn’t hate her as much as the general population of the world. Hell, the plant lover had spent a good chunk of the last five of the seven years Harley was with Joker trying to get the blonde to leave the sick SOB; she probably treated her excellently.  
  
Of course, that was before one of the other doctors of Arkham decided Harley might have a better go at Miss Isley than they had. Then she realized, to her dismay of mind and now thoroughly bruised body, that Ivy was a bit of a hypocrite.  
  
“_ _ **Traitor**_ _!”_  
  
_That was the basis of the conversation that the two women had kept up for the entire session Harley had to be left alone with Ivy. An entire friggin’ hour of being called every cruel thing Ivy could come up with, spewing hate and venom out of her mouth like Mount Vesuvius when it erupted and decorated the world around it in grey ash and smoke. Then, when the timer in Harley’s desk had given a little chirp that signaled that the session was five minutes from its end, a surprise had happened. Rather than a guard’s footsteps sounding heavily down the hall, the little floral plants Harley had set up along the wall in one of her old desk drawers had grown up to be over thirty feet—as it seemed, Ivy was actually getting much more powerful with the mind control of the plants, even if they weren’t her specific babies grown in a hutch outside of the city limits with unstable chemicals and hybrid blossoms—and reached quite suddenly across the room at Harley. They had wrapped around her neck and started tossing her about her room and Ivy had continued screaming curses and promises of contempt at her until the guards had come in to find Harley pinned to the ceiling._  
  
_She had fallen ten feet, belly-flop, onto the floor when the guards had wrestled Ivy to the floor and given her a sedative. The fall had landed Harley three cracked ribs and a trip to the med-ward._

* * *

 

“Do I really give off that sort of impression to women?”  
  
Jonathan Crane, The Scarecrow, all-powerful god of fear, slapped his head to the cafeteria table he, Jervis and Eddie were sitting at and begged to God for a migraine so he could ask for an escort to the med-ward and get away from this conversation they had been going over ever since the Mad Hatter’s last therapy session with Harley.  
  
Eddie found it in himself to hold off putting himself in physical harm like Jonathan, but settled for giving Jervis a disapproving look, sipping from his carton of whole milk and ignoring the green peas and meatloaf—both cold as the dead—on his tray entirely.  
  
“For the love of god, Jervis,” Jonathan growled, “Let it go.”  
  
“How can I let it go?!” The British blonde shrieked just loud enough to make his two ginger friends’ ears ring, but not enough to draw one of the guards over from the doorways; his grip on his own milk carton was keeping him from going into full mania, “She’s right! I was probably giving off the biggest ringer for gay-dar in the entire building, including that transvestite in accounting!”  
  
“Jervis,” Jonathan spoke, grabbing the other man’s wrist, tight and a little frenzied, “That was then and this is now. We’ll go over this one more time and then if you bring it up again, I am going to slap you. Does that sound acceptable?”  
  
Eddie would never admit it, but he was pleased beyond understanding when Jervis bit his lip and then nodded his head after a moment of thought. The blonde knew that Jonathan would hold up on his threat, too, so he would enjoy—or shiver from—this for however long it lasted.  
  
Jonathan sighed and brought himself back up into a straight back position of the authority he used—and still did sometimes—have. His hands locked together and as he took in an inhalation of air before speaking, none of them noticing from a side glance the visage of the Ventriloquist entering the cafeteria, for once without Scareface and looking a little more curious and pointedly upright than he did without the puppet.  
  
“So, we’ve established that Harley was probably right about why your Alice had no particular inclination to ask you out before that swaggering oaf. Now the problem comes to pinpointing the exact cause of that and then talking it to death until we figure out if you are indeed as Alice thought, or if you play for the politically correct team.”  
  
“Yes,” Eddie chirped, eyes looking over to take in the sight of Arnold wandering with his food tray towards them, taking a seat at the very end of their table, “Like establishing your sexual preferences away from the prying ears and eyes of the other so-called doctors that run this place.”  
  
“But-but-but,” Jervis stuttered, “I’m _British_. This isn’t exactly something I was brought up to talk about…”  
  
“Oh, well, that’s a point for repressed homosexuality,” The Riddler grinned, earning a flashing red blush from the blonde, and Arnold looking at the three of them even more openly, his glasses gleaning from the poisonous-seeming white lights above their heads; almost creepy.  
  
Jonathan ate a bit of his own grimy, disgustingly green peas before going on, “Indeed, keeping quiet about sex and common state of being can lead to confusion about preferences, and unknowingly blocking out your own feelings toward love in general. For all you know, you may love Alice, but only because she’s the only person who has ever shown you obvious signs of affection. Even if that affection was completely platonic.”  
  
Jervis opened his mouth to protest, but Jonathan cut him off, voice a veritable pallet of control and reason, “Now, let’s see….Did you ever have any girlfriends at university?”  
  
As Jervis blushed and did his best to answer the questions given to him by the two darker, slightly more frightening men, the Ventriloquist looked over toward the door to find the person he had been piqued about the cafeteria for. Coming in, with her hair slightly out of place and a look of someone who had been thoroughly dosed with a sedative, was Pamela Isley. The puppet carrier’s fists clenched at the sight of her sloughing off the looks from everyone else and simply taking up her usual meal of a salad and two large glasses of water, before heading over to the table at the far right of where the four men were sitting; her usual spot near a window that blasted in light when the sky was clear (not that day) and was meant for only two to three people. She used to use it when Harley was still an inmate.  
  
Picking up his own tray again, the bespectacled man walked up and sat down with the redhead, Eddie being the only one of the other three men to notice. The ginger raised a brow at the scene of timid, Scarface-less Ventriloquist taking a seat with the asylum plant lover. Both of his eyebrows raised in tandem when he noted Arnold actually making conversation with Ivy, seeming to ask her questions.  
  
However, he did manage to tune the image out as he went back to interrogating Jervis with Jonathan.  
  
So far, it was going one way or another. Jervis did previously have a couple short-term girlfriends in school, but they were nothing, save for the opportunity to know what kissing had been like. He had enjoyed it, but as far as Jonathan could pry out of the man, the blonde had participated in little sexual acts; those of which had made him uncomfortable. He’d never tried it with a man, but Eddie had the feeling that there was something else.  
  
“Have you ever looked at a man? You know, sort of like you’d look at Alice?”  
  
Jervis got quiet after that.  
  
A heavy interruption in a forest glen; a hutch rabbit facing down an angry fox. All three of the close, quietly talking men turned to find Arnold clutching his cheek, a just-forming hand of red pain spreading under his fingers, but he was holding firm in his seat, glaring at Ivy as she hissed something at the small man and called for her guard to take her back to her cell.  
  
Eddie thought he’d heard the woman say, “…You have no idea…” but he couldn’t be sure.

 


	9. Robin For Dinner

_-:-_  
James Brown didn’t write lyrics. He wrote commands and instructions.  
-Twitter Wit.

 

* * *

  
  
A break in the storm that comes from a lighthouse spinning in the dark as if it were a right hand centered piano key playing in between twenty keys of the left side of the piano. Robin turned from where he was leaning over the low sitting coffee table toward the door that opened into Harley’s apartment. He had been there for only an hour and had, honestly, truthfully, thought that she would take longer to get home. Perhaps he should have recalculated in the fact that she was just as unpredictable as she used to be, despite losing the body suit and such.  
  
An ominous chord plays on the piano and is followed quite swiftly, in haste and desperation by the lower chords of a cello. Harley stood in the center of her doorway, Bud and Lou at her ankles, with her arms full of three paper bags of groceries. From what Robin could smell and see, she had bought all the ingredients for making some sort of casserole or lasagna along with breadsticks and something to do with teeny-tiny red potatoes. Her hair was coming undone from her ponytail, her red dress was ruffled obscenely and she was giving the Boy Wonder a look that only Alfred had given him. She looked surprised for about five seconds, mouth hanging open, before she gave a noise a dog would give after its food bowl was taken away and shooed the hyenas inside, kicking her door shut and settled with giving him a dirty look before proceeding to her kitchen.  
  
“Another probation officer, aren’t I the luckiest girl in the world…” she snarled from inside the kitchen, the sound of her fridge opening causing Robin to raise a brow under his domino mask and flinch back when he heard something break and her curse. Bud growled at the little defender of Gotham just once, before proceeding to take his usual sleeping spot on the sofa as he was sore from walking up the stairs after just coming out another of his paralyzed attacks, tail curling as much as it could around his hind-quarters. Lou looked in curiosity for about a moment, but then went on into the kitchen where Robin could just make out the sounds of broken glass being swept up in a metal dustpan.  
  
Mild hesitation, not too different from a sea breeze pulling back before moving into the bay to collide with the sands and beach-front property. As the sounds of glass knocking together intensified (as well as the collection of Harley’s cursing at the universe in general under her breath) Robin practically forgot about the files on the Arkham inmates—why should he remember anyway; none of the notes were Harley’s so it was basically what Batman already had from Bartholomew and Leland—and felt the tentative feelings of a human being wanting to help another human being. He sidled into the doorway without a clue as to what the hell he was doing as he stopped moving and just looked at the mess she had made out of a broken glass jar of basil tomato sauce on her kitchen floor, red swirls in the sauce residue as she made for the paper towels on her spin-out rack, eyeing the brunette once before finally speaking to him. She kept her head down, and he wasn’t sure if he should take her words at their value.  
  
“So, obviously you came looking for my notes on the others because you couldn’t find anything in my file cabinets at Arkham,” snark and bite as the tissues on the tiles absorbed the red sauce, “And before you deny it, don’t bother. Unlike Leland, I don’t leave my door locked. There’s really no point since you’re going to end up coming along sooner or later.”  
  
“Except there was nothing to find,” he pointed out absently, inwardly wishing to stab himself for saying anything on it at all. “The only paperwork you have is what the other doctors give you and there was nothing in your own handwriting.”  
  
Blue rivers. He could see every little vein in her wrists as Harley shoved the ruined papers into her bin and then stood back up, absently kicking off her shoes, which each made an echoing thud against the walls that they each hit, “I don’t write notes on them. I don’t need to. I actually lived with them, unlike everyone else that works in the asylum. Oh, and you, despite the fact that you and your boss-person bug our hideouts whenever you can find us.”  
  
“You’re forgetting yourself.”  
  
“Fine. _Them_ ,” she restated, spitting out the word like acid, which it probably was considering that, despite the fact that most of the Rogues hated her guts now, she was rather loyal. She started moving for the skillets hanging above her island stove and oven, removing one that, should she get hostile, could knock out any random street thug, no problem.   
  
A moment. Oddly, his instincts told him not to tense up as she moved the skillet over to the counter attached the wall, setting it down and pointed to the Robin and then toward the cupboards above the sink, “If you’re going to grill me, take out the seasoning and help me make dinner. Selina will be here in an hour, so hey, we’ll have a buffer in case I decide to poison you. Yay.”  
  
Robin snorted, the untrained, street urchin Tim part of him wanting very much to tell her that he would do no such thing as to help her make food for Catwoman, and he was about to say so in that way of effect, but she silenced him by tossing him three potatoes and a peeler. He caught them as easily as he caught her next warning.  
  
“And don’t think of just leaving me here. Nightwing might be able to get away with stunts like that with Batsy, but this is my apartment and even if he was here instead of you,” here she grins and he flinches back a little, “I’d still make either of you do it. I’ve been around too long to be pushed around by a boy I watched grow into that ponytail he wears now. Mentioning his old pixie-boots would be more than enough amo for that.”  
  
Robin wanted so very badly to refuse, really, really. But, unfortunately, that little street urchin that still was inside of him also…felt kind of bad for Harley since she’d reformed.   
  
So, he did as he was told.

 


	10. Imaginary Line

_-:-_  
I try to capture the essence of the fairy as it would be if you came upon it somewhere, going about its business, and it stopped long enough for you both to look at each other’s world.  
-Kim Turner.

 

* * *

  
  
Amazingly, really, really, Joan Leland found herself actually wanting to hit someone that wasn’t one of her more aggressive or abusive patients. For the first time, ever, since coming to Arkham (after the whole Harley/Joker thing), the dark woman wanted to actually confide something in her blonde now-again colleague that was almost like confiding in a best friend in high school.  
  
Walking—no, actually, walking was the polite word for her movements. _Charging_ through the halls of the doctors’ area of Arkham, a folder of paperwork clutched to her chest, Joan finally turned down the hall and found Harley’s (always) open door, relishing the sounds of wind instruments and maybe piano in the most classical of forms as she stepped into the room and shut the door when she found Harley just sitting atop her desk, going over paperwork next to a pot of tea, steaming cup beside her knee.  
  
When the door made a creek—the same as all of the doors the doctors’ had in their offices—at closing, Harley politely looked up from her piece of paper (ah, another crinkled page of the erotica Joan had found her with for the last month and a half) and raised a blonde brow at how Joan was leaning against her door gasping for breath. A quality the blonde had only seen on the road, displayed by rabbits she had almost ran over.   
  
Bud remained in his bed, completely ignoring Joan as the other therapist tried to regain her composure against the hardwood that blocked out the sounds and sights and smells (yes, the asylum had a smell all of its own that reminded Harley—and Joan, herself—of the morgue at country general hospital drenched with the stuff used by certain maintenance service workers consisting of pine salts and ether). Lou, on the other hand, as Harley waited for Joan to speak and took a sip of the drink in the teapot, raised his ears and tilted his head at Leland.  
  
“Honey, you’re home,” Harley grinned, cringing at the drink’s taste, but still swallowing anyway and setting the cup down on the desk with a withering look. “Is there something I can do for you?”  
  
Finding her voice, Joan removed herself from the door and took a seat across from Harley, enjoying how soft all of the other woman’s furniture felt compared to everyone else’s, “I have to ask you something kind of important.”  
  
“Uh-huh,” Harley nodded, going back to going over her papers with a calculating eye, but still paying attention to Joan (and Dr. Leland could tell she was paying attention because, unlike with Dr. Bartholomew or Dr. Wu or, hah-hah, Dr. Arkham, she didn’t turn completely away, or start muttering under her breath or turn up the little radio Joan had seen taped to the underside of her desk the week after she’d turned it into a storage unit-slash-sitting area where most of the other doctors at least had a _panic_ _button_ of some kind).  
  
Joan set the paper files she’d brought along on the coffee table, Harley wordlessly handing the other woman a cup of the tea (“What’s this?” “Silver Needles Tea. Jervis is on a health kick and I thought I’d try a batch before making some for him in session later. There is no caffeine in this. At all.” “Good, I’m too wired for the moment, anyway.”) and Joan opened the files to some specific pages, pulling out one with a hand-held size photo of a strawberry blonde woman, similar in appearance to Harley when both she and Joan had started out, but without glasses, with a lot more makeup and confidence wafting off of her even in print. The name of the woman was printed under the picture and read ‘Dr. Chase Meridian’ in bold.  
  
“She your girlfriend or something?”  
  
Joan rolled her eyes and took a sip of her tea before speaking (actually, the taste of the tea did make her face squeeze at the edges so it took her a second), “Hah, funny, but seriously, no. Did you interview her yet?”  
  
“Would I ask who she was if I interviewed her?”  
  
“Point,” Joan ground out, administering more pressure to the paper with thumb and pointer finger, “But you picked out her file out of the hundreds Bartholomew gave you.”  
  
“Her and a few others that looked good enough on paper to make me think that they had balls and a functioning spine,” Harley added, holding up a piece of the kind of paper that looked like it had once been used for deli meat at some point, Joan able to make out the shape of a man on top of a woman kissing deeply and other such things that were totally inappropriate for Arkham Asylum that only Harley could get away with having in her office. “Why? Is there something wrong with my choice of one head in fifty?”  
  
“Yes,” Dr. Leland enunciated, her voice becoming thick in confirmation, as well as her hand shaking as she actually balled up the profile and tossed it into the trash bin in the corner underneath the plant holders nailed to the walls. It landed with a little splash as Harley had just watered the things in an attempt to get Ivy to shut up about how she was treating them.  
  
Now Harley looked interested. Actually interested in anything Joan had to say that didn’t concern the Arkham inmates. The blonde doctor set down another paper she had picked up—this one with a very pronounced and outlined picture of a black scrotum getting massaged by a Caucasian hand with green painted fingernails—and crossed her arms across her chest, turning so her legs fell over the side of the desk and her (shoeless) feet skimmed the carpet.  
  
Her voice was light and Leland, for the moment, ignored the little happy feeling forming from her temples to her shoulders, “Well, you’re the doctor,” Harley grinned here, downing the rest of her tea without a face of disturbed disgust, jumping off of the desk with the flow of the gymnast Leland knew her to be to land like a teenager on the duct tape decorated chair of hers, rump on one arm and head over the other. “Tell me how I’ve done wrong now.”  
  
In spite of the little smile Harley was giving Joan, the more mature (in most ways) woman retained the irritation painted across her face as she sat back down, taking another swallow of the god-awful tea provided to her before moving on, hands moving with her in illustration of the moment and feelings radiating, “It isn’t so much what you’ve done wrong, as what you could do wrong if you hire this…woman…after the interview tomorrow. I already told Dr. Arkham that I think…well…” Joan rubbed the back of her neck, and if Harley was not mistaken, there was the dusting of a blush flushing the other woman’s cheeks. “She’s just…not a good fit. She’s too young, and too ambitious and just-“  
  
“Joan.”  
  
“Five minutes into the interview I wanted to throw her out of my window and ask you to help me make it so nobody would find her body.”  
  
Ah, now Harley understood the blush as Dr. Leland brought her hands up to her own level, fingers in the motion the act would symbolize in strangling someone; perfect nails taught and pleading to dig into flesh. The act of blood rushing to Joan’s head wasn’t in embarrassment of some girl-crush; it was an act of becoming unassumingly enraged. It actually caused the blonde to get up into a more proper position on the chair, grabbing a disgusting Girl Scout cookie from the tray on the coffee table next to the scones that Jervis liked.  
  
“I’m flattered you would think of me as useful,” Harley chortled, crossing her legs so they joined at the ankle.  
  
Joan gave out a moan, bringing hands to her face as she lay back on the sofa like so many, many of their patients, “It’s true, she’s so freaking annoying. Worse than you _ever_ were!”  
  
“That’s even possible?”  
  
“Oh yes,” Joan pointed at the ceiling, leaning back up to almost jab Harley in the nose and made the other lean backwards like slap-stick comedy. “She’s too Public Relations, oily as an eel, not even a little naïve as most interns her age. She kept going on, and on, and on, and on about how if she was inducted into the Arkham staff she would do her best to better the “nucleus dependant relationships” of the Rogues and how maybe with her around they might open up about their childhoods and “that masked, dark knight” Batman.”  
  
She tried, really Harley did, but after the words hit her in such a frenzy as was presented to her by Joan, it was really only natural that the cookie she was eating was spat out onto the fuzzy carpet to keep her from choking on it as her head tilted back and forth as she laughed so hard she had to hold onto her stomach to keep from tearing the stitches she’s received a week and two days ago when some charming drug dealer with orders from Bane tried to get her squished by a train. It was a little frightening for Joan—completely unaware that Harley could actually still laugh like herself and not like some bimbo in a suit—who flinched a little at the reaction. But after another minute of the blonde continuing on like so, Joan stomped her foot and stood up from her seat, arms on either side of her as she made fists in exasperation.  
  
“It’s not funny! I actually had to listen to that bullshit while being fully aware that the little fool wasn’t even wearing a bra!”  
  
As that only caused Harley to laugh harder and rotate in her seat so her face was squished up against the cushions, the door to the room opened and Joan turned to find Bartholomew dragging in Jervis with the two armed guards always to be with each Rogue when they are escorted from place to place. Joan’s rage wavered to a simmer and her shoulders sulked as Bartholomew gave a terrified look toward Harley, the blonde trying to reign herself in to only giggles with little tears of joy in the corners of her eyes.  
  
“Dr. Bartholomew,” Joan spoke, voice almost hoarse from her little emotional display, and body leaning over to pick up the other files from the coffee table; careful not to drop anything like a pen or a clip that Jervis could use, as per protocol. “I—Harley and I were just having a discussion. I—we—I…”  
  
“It’s fine Dr. Leland,” Harley broke in, straightening her shirt to look more presentable as the guards set Jervis down (the poor man looking even more startled than Bartholomew, inching away from Harley as Dr. Quinzel lead the other doctors out of the room, dainty hand patting Joan on the shoulder) to unlock his cuffs. “I’ll take your words under advisement and have a word with Dr. Arkham later. This Miss Meridian probably won’t be joining us if her credentials are not as truthful as to be believed on paper.”  
  
The guards released the last of Jervis’s restraints and started out into the hall with Bartholomew—the male doctor saving whatever he may have wanted to say to Harley for later when Harley was finished with her session with the Mad Hatter; removing his glasses to clean so he didn’t look directly at the woman (and why would he, if all there was to be shown on his face other than fear?)—as Joan had this look on her face. This stupefied look when Harley nodded for the lot of the others to leave, and turned back to Jervis as she shut the door; leaving Joan feeling oddly accomplished in the wake of being left in the hall and faced with a shut door.  
  
Joan felt a lot better when she heard the two blondes begin to speak over the sound of tea being poured. Harley’s radio picked up again in volume, but every one of the doctors knew that was just in case the guards tried to hone in on the confidential conversations.  
  
A perfect way to end her morning of frustration and irrational rage. Truly, it was.  
  
Shaking her head—the container of all her knowledge she braved upon her shoulders in that which is to be called her neck, beautiful and strong that it is—to relieve herself of the mild high of dizziness she got from conversing for over an hour with the strange woman, Dr. Leland stepped away from the door and made the way back to her office.  
  
That taste of Silver Needles Tea would be stuck on her tongue for the rest of the day, though. Gross.

 


	11. Dropped Hints

_-:-_  
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,  
When you’re not happy, my skies are gray.  
-Nursery Rhymes.

 

* * *

  
  
Honestly, Joan wasn’t exactly sure why she was standing outside of the one door in the Asylum that had always been open during working hours—now shut right and tight and doubtlessly with a ten pound deadbolt--when every one of the other doctors were busy with their patients, like she should have been. It was not proper; she had three schizophrenics and two deluded inmates with extreme paranoia to see to after the lunch hour was over, and instead of eating, she was deciding whether or not to brave knocking on hardwood.  
  
Finally, swallowing her fear—the fear that all the doctors seemed to have just being anywhere near Harley in closed quarters or otherwise—Joan raised her fist and struck the wood, the sound echoing for less than a hollow second. The impact caused the exact center of the door to give a creak similar to ice in the Arctic as it cracks dry.   
  
It was creepy. Joan really preferred it when the door was open, even if it was odd.  
  
There were no footsteps to come about, but Harley responded in due process with an angry voice that should not belong to the blonde, but did, now that she’d given up much use of her accent, “Go away, Joan.”  
  
The dark woman narrowed her eyes at a little crack in the wood that, when squinting, looked a bit like a trident, “Now, you can’t know it’s me, I haven’t said anything yet.”  
  
“Go away, Joan,” Harley repeated, still not walking towards the door. Although, as Joan leaned closer in toward the door, she could hear the sound of paper—slick, thin paper—being shuffled about.  
  
“Are you,” Joan paused, jiggling the handle of the door to try her luck, “Are you doing paperwork?”  
  
There was a ringing—really, it was different enough to be like a bell in church—silence that descended for a moment, and Joan knew she must have been right.   
  
Joan jiggled the handle again, and, as a precursor to the inevitable shouting match that would follow (and really, Joan could understand that, seeing as Harley belittled all of the other doctors in the place every time another doctor needed a consult; doubtless something that had rubbed off on the thin blonde when she was still on amicable terms with Crane and Ivy) kicked her heeled shoe against the bottom of the door.  
  
“Harley, open the door, I wanna see what you’re doing!”  
  
A reverberating growl came to the level of just where she’d kicked and Joan let go of the door, flinching an inch or two backwards because—surprise—she’d straight up forgotten that Harley’s hyenas still were staying with the former hench wench during working hours until Bud was finished with his medication. The breathing the animal gave out through mouth and nostrils gave way to heat that caused the wooden floorboards to steam and turn frosted for a moment, before footsteps—flesh on solid, not heels to make a ringing jostle—started up and turned the beast the other way.  
  
There was an angry, metal sound before the handle turned clockwise and the solidness of the fine door opened wide to the sight of Harley with a hand on her hip, the butterfly bandage from when she’d been attacked on the street the week before still in place and still giving Joan a little thrill to chuckle at the tiny figures of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck on either end of the bandage. She suppressed it, though, and walked in before she simply was told face-to-face to piss off and was barred from the room again.  
  
Indeed, there were papers on the desk—what a common place thing to be joyful about, but Joan couldn’t help it as Harley _DIDN’T_ ever do paperwork unless she had her ears chewed off for days on end, and even then only did about as much that was required so the Jeremiah Arkham didn’t can her—but they were not the simple glazed white of the papers the other doctors had to sign and fill out. These papers, Joan grinned happily, curiously, as she hopped on the edge of the desk and picked a couple up before she could be stopped and manhandled back out of the room by the other, were slicker and obviously in higher end quality, with little pictures in the corners showing off people Joan had never seen before, something like biographies lining below the pictures with little connotations in deep red pen made by Harley every so often.  
  
“Can’t you go and bother Eddie or Professor Crane, or find something more constructive to do?” Harley whined, taking a seat on the couch reserved for the patients when they came in, pouring herself a cup of sharp smelling coffee into one of the cups placed about the coffee table in front of her, adding one sugar while Joan looked at the papers a bit more thoroughly before opening her mouth again.   
  
“Are these the new interns starting here in a few weeks?”  
  
Harley swallowed all of the coffee in her cup before pouring another for herself and then one for Joan. She wasn’t looking quite as upbeat as she had the last couple days since they’d gotten back from Central City on a fairly good note after meeting with one of the techs that had called them over for a consult at Iron Heights—her hair hanging in a loose bun and the rest of herself dressed like a depressed British yuppie—but she did relieve herself of the wrinkle characterized lines that came with her frowning to answer Joan’s inquiries, possibly just trying to get the mocha woman out of her office without offending her.  
  
One small step for mankind…  
  
“No,” Harley sneered, adding some cream to the steaming cup before her that bore the figure of a dark brown rat with its mouth in a jaw breaking open pose where the cup’s opening was, “Some of them just might be. Arkham wants me to go over their histories and then interview them here to see if they could stand to be here for more than a month. You know, like throwing dead things into the ocean, checking if it’s what a shark will eat.”  
  
“You being the shark?”  
  
“Me and the Rogues. Don’t worry, though, only three of them even look vaguely good for the jobs.”  
  
That didn’t sound right to Joan. Fact was, if she remembered correctly, Arkham said they were going to try to train at least ten new psychiatrists to lighten the case load around asylum. It sounded perfect to the older doctors, seeing as the last internship had consisted of five young men, Joan and Harley herself (before the blonde went off the deep end and bait to lure in the new meat hadn’t become so hard to find), but then, Harley probably knew something that the other doctors—Joan included—did not.  
  
Joan accepted and took a sip from her coffee before asking, “I thought Dr. Arkham wanted ten. There are twenty applications here, after all.”  
  
Harley held up a finger, the very tip of it pointing downward like a claw, “First, none of the _**children**_ in there are older than twenty-five. Second, Dr. Arkham is a moron if he thinks he’s going to get competent psychiatrists in there to treat the Rogues. Three, the inmates can barely tolerate you and the other doctors, let alone offspring from…”  
  
Harley looked like she was trying to remember where any of the applicants came from, but settled with a little diddy that would have made Joan laugh if she weren’t in a somewhat dangerous seated area near the hyenas, “East Hopeless Dreams, Nowhere.”  
  
“That seems a little harsh.”  
  
“I _am_ harsh. The others will be worse.”  
  
Joan conceded the point with a nod, finding one of the files with blue pen marks that could have been a smiley face once, but was a little disfigured to look like a leer.  
  
She slipped the paper out from between two other papers—one with the exclamation “ _Not in This Lifetime_ ” and the other with “ _Dress Him Up in Blue, Joker Would Love to Relive Killing His Brother_ ” in obtrusive and offensive penned in words—and held it out in front of her so she could read the bio without risking coffee getting on it.  
  
There picture held a curly haired ginger no older than twenty-three, freckles lining her face and standing in the frame leaning against a cane with a smile. Becky Albright is what it read at the top, Harley’s penmanship in blue circling the type and then flowing outwards with an arrow to the words _“Minor possibility, if when bringing up derogatory comments on handicap doesn’t cause for alarm or for her to cry_.”  
  
Joan put the paper at the top of the pile and gave Harley a little look that Joan was sure her own mother had used on herself once upon a time when she drove her up the walls, but the blue eyed woman wasn’t looking at her. She was too busy frowning into her coffee cup, one hand absently brushing her fingernails over the lines of the bandage on her forehead. Wanting was obvious in that the blonde very much wanted to rip the thing off her head.  
  
Instead of saying what she should have said, like, “This is a little inappropriate” or “You’re not really going to say anything like this, are you?” Joan settled for asking a more or less rhetorical question, getting up from her perch to poke the blonde in the shoulder.  
  
“You haven’t eaten anything for lunch, have you?”  
  
Harley tried to wave off Joan’s hand, but was (maybe not surprised, but,) alarmed to find that Joan grabbed her hand and hauled her up, taking the cup Harley was still sipping from and putting it back onto the coffee table.  
  
Joan Leland yanked Harley Quinzel out of the former clown’s own office to take her to the lounge for something more filling than the thin mint cookies Joan had seen in the empty space that had formerly served to house drawers in Harley desk. Harley had **actually** been _working_ , and it felt like her pounding on the door had been a success in finding more little things to learn of her former patient.   
  
True, it was unintentional, but _still_.

 


	12. Coyote's Ugliest

Harvey Bullock wasn’t exactly a lucky man. To the contrary, most of what his life entailed was dark, ironic, or dumb luck, and what kept him on the force with the Gotham MCU was nothing short of a miracle that he knew ran on near empty most of the time with IAB constantly on his back. That said, on the very rare occasions when he did get lucky, it was all thanks to a bottle or two of Tequila or strong vodka, in a seedy bar, and with a woman who, come morning when she woke up in his apartment, would likely have forgotten his name and would never be likely to see him again because of…well, the less than desirable impression his apartment left on them.  
  
On those nights, he rarely blacked out and forgot her name, but when he did and woke up before her, he’d go for his shower, clean up until he heard the sheets rustle and bed squeak with the relinquishment of weight; this followed by his turning the knob in his shower just enough to lower the stream, until he heard the front door slam, signaling that he was left to his own devices in his own dominion.  
  
This was one of those mornings.   
  
Bullock felt like his head weighed more than his upper torso and had been slammed into the doors of an elevator, his stomach burbling with an effort not to dump the last evening’s meal and drinks on the lump beside him covered up in the bed sheets and couldn’t remember a single thing about anything after he’d entered that bar at the edge of the docks after he’d left shift of a stake-out to get some dirt on a few opium growing yuppies in their yacht.  
  
The rotund detective looked at the lump under his covers, noting, quite absently the blonde shift of hair just poking out into sight with a right arm grasping his spare pillow to put a lid on the sunlight coming in from his balcony window. Swerving his head, Harvey looked about and also sighted a pair of ‘Hello Kitty’ thong and panties on his door handle, thus concluding that he’d at the very least had a good night, despite not actually remembering it.  
  
‘ _But, sadly_ ,’ Bullock thought, words in his head sifting around like alligators in a bayou; getting up carefully and heading to the bathroom, ‘ _All good lays must come to an end_.’  
  
Before he opened and kept himself in the shower until the woman left, Bullock was pleased to see there were not one, but two, condoms inside the waste basket that was near to overflowing. He shut the door to the bathroom with as much of a hop that he could muster without going directly to the toilet to vomit.

* * *

 

An hour was the longest he usually spent in the shower cleaning up, waiting for the sound of the front door to slam shut. An hour and twenty if he woke up from a blackout and wanted to take it easy on the woman so she wouldn’t feel completely awful at the sight of his personal environment of poorly maintained trash, ten years out of date furniture and a hole he’d accidentally shot into his wall one night when he thought he was being robbed (which just turned out to be a hoard of roaches scurrying across his walls).  
  
So, after the time lapsed and he’d heard no sounds, Bullock just assumed that this lady was a lot more quiet than the others and had left like a ghost.   
  
He picked up his one clean towel from the rack on the wall and tied it like a toga, unlocking the door and stepping out to make sure she hadn’t left anything behind like her own condoms or a hair scrunchy or—like the forth to last woman he’d slept with—some sort of firearm.   
  
Bullock certainly didn’t expect the woman to actually still be there, eyes the size of an ostrich, looking at him like he was a kidnapper, hands keeping the sheets tightly wound to her chest; her mouth shut, but most obviously only to keep her from screaming.  
  
A little memory came back to him as he looked at her, from the night before, when she’d been under him and smiling and…reaching the intended point of all sex endeavors.  
  
Now _he_ looked like he wanted to throw up—memory bringing hormones be damned—but not because there was a woman still in his bed after a fabulous night of drinking.  
  
‘ _Fuck_ … _fuck_ , _fuck_ , _fuck_ …’  
  
It was because he actually knew the woman, knew he would end up seeing her again, knew that she hated him and he, likewise, hated her in equal fervor, and…God help him…knew that she was going to start yelling in a moment and he was going to end up staring at her figure under the sheets as she looked for her clothes and they both figured out a way not to mention this incident to any living person on the planet.  
  
However, when she did open her mouth—him flinching a little and holding his towel tighter to him—it was not with a piercing wrath with the accent he had grown to loathe the very first time she shot at him and used him as a toy completely unassociated with sex. She just cleared the morning cotton-mouth that came with her own hangover and spoke normally (which included an accent, but not so horribly mangled as in her less than scrupulous existence).  
  
“Please, please, please, please tell me we used protection. Please.”  
  
With his usual demeanor of a gruff, sober Kodiak bear, Bullock lifted a foot and toed the top of his trash, noting the woman’s blue eyes turn over in their sockets with relief; a sigh escaping her so strongly that her shoulders sagged and a tiny (not threatening at all) smile graced her features.  
  
Her head tilted forward, shaking back and forth twice before she got up from her position on the bed—hands very careful to keep her covered in the sheet—and made to get her underthings from the doorknob, fully aware that Bullock turned his head when she maneuvered to put her thong on, but let one eye meander when she dropped the sheet and put her bra on.  
  
“I don’t suppose you remember anything?”  
  
“Nuh-uh.”  
  
She found her jeans from the other night and put them on with all the grace every gymnast anywhere could display, turning her head back to him, “Well, then there’s nothing really to say. I’m not in any pain and you’re not liable to contract any diseases I might be carrying that my immunity hasn’t eradicated. Easy to pretend that it never happened, yeah?”  
  
She found her black T-shirt once she opened the door to his living room and discovered the it was hanging half out of the freezer when he’d shut it last night. Pulling it on, she looked about for her shoes with a little sneer directed at the general state of the apartment, Bullock following her out only to maneuver to his coffee maker, pressing the starter button; echoes of liquid drops falling into the glass pot always there to be filled as she finds the black slip-ons atop his sofa.  
  
“You going to mention this to your little friends in the nuthouse?”  
  
Tromping her shoes on her feet twice to the floor until they fit perfectly to her heels, the blonde, whom he would rather throw himself in front of a train than ever see again, found her wallet and made for the front door, opening it and only glancing back to give the most snobbish, horrifically malevolent grin he’d ever seen on a woman, replying, “No thank you, Coyote Ugly. I have enough crap in my life without mentioning that I slept with _you_ of all people the one night I actually figured out the right amount of alcohol I need to drink before actually getting any sort of buzz, let alone a blackout.”  
  
His front door did not slam shut. She just opened and shut it like she was a gust of wind that pushed an already moving door to complete its movement.  
  
Bullock would forget the whole thing ever happened. Coyote Ugly? Indeed.

* * *

 

So early in the morning—the time of day she really likes because it’s cleansing and doesn’t hurt as much as when the sun is out and stings her skin and eyes (she is nocturnal, perhaps this is how all her kind feel in actual daylight)—Harley can see her breath in the air just before it ascends upwards and joins with the morning mist.  
  
A light buzzing begins in her jean pocket and she is suddenly glad her phone was not forgotten in that disgusting apartment, just before she pulls the phone out and flips it open, cutting off the rest of the score to Queen’s ‘ _We Will Rock You’_ that serves as her ring-tone. She says hello before the other person asks for her, but continues walking the way she hopes—if she’s not lost in the map in her head—will lead her to the diner not too far from her apartment. She wants something rich in calories for breakfast to take her mind off of the black, blank place that would have been a memory of last night, if it weren’t for how much she drank.  
  
“Oh, hello Mr. Wayne... Yes, I remember that we’re having lunch at the diner around twelve… Yes, I’ll be there, I’m just out for breakfast before I go shopping. First day off in a week, you know.”

 


	13. Broken China

_-:-_  
I was afraid of the terrible sadness on his face.  
-Aphrodite’s Blessings.

 

* * *

  
  
“… _You terrible little Bandersnatch!”  
  
There is a slicing through the air that is slowed and morphed into something ugly when the heated object in careful scientist’s hands leaves his clutches and is launched forward. Then everything but the moment stops in the realization of what has been done just because of words and volatile emotion coming out in a way that was not wanted.   
  
The feelings go away to be replaced by a numbness when the object thrown impacts and shatters. There is not screaming (_ _ **she doesn’t scream very much or at all, he remembers; later, at least**_ _) but there is something like a submissive whine that becomes drowned out by clatters of glass and dripping of tea and…red fluid. Even if she did start to yell for the guards (_ _ **she doesn’t, she’s stiff and not angry, just hurt**_ _) he wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the deep pounding in his ears and the rushing in his head that always comes before he finds himself in Wonderland…Except, he’s not going to Wonderland. He’s staying in the disorderly room to be stock still and afraid and sick and worried._  
  
But, that’s before the guards really do come in and he’s being sedated and walked (“Don’t you dare hurt him, just take him back to his cell. If I catch him in the infirmary it’s your jobs on the line.”) to his cell and falls asleep the second his head sets on the pillow, ears picking up on Eddie and Jonathan asking what happened.

* * *

 

“What happened?”  
  
Continuing to rest his head in his hands at the chess table he and Jonathan had used every recreational period since they’d begun to become familiar with each other, Jervis acknowledged Jonathan just by giving a little groan and sinking to his elbows and swaddled his face in his arms.  
  
“Yeah, did you seriously hit Harley with a hot teapot?”   
  
Oh, Eddie, fabulous. Jervis found himself feeling more loathsome than ever as he heard Eddie scuffle over a chair from around the area of the television as Jonathan began setting up the chess pieces, neither one of them allowing Jervis to wallow in his own misery without their interference. Not willing in the least.  
  
“Please, _don’t_ , I feel awful enough already without getting a lecture from the both of you,” Jervis whined pitifully as he lifted his head and they got quite the eyeful of just how horrible he looked after three days and nights with no sleep and constantly getting complimented recently on his wardrobe (the same suit as everyone else in the Rogues Wing) and how “well” he was doing in therapy by Joker. Red eyes, ruffled hair, the scent of not using the crappy emerald green bar of soap given to each of the inmates in the shower.  
  
“Well, for whatever it’s worth, she didn’t seem to be mad at you when I asked her about your little episode, the other day.”  
  
“What did she tell you about the session?”  
  
Jonathan put out his hand as a fist, all of the chess pieces set out and Eddie waiting with bated breath as Jervis did a similar motion, a distance between their fists measured out in three inches. Then Eddie spoke, “Rock-Paper-Scissors.” The two players shook their fists three times, stopped and then it was revealed Jonathan won with Paper and Jervis lost with Rock.  
  
“To answer your question,” Jonathan started, setting out to move a front running pawn forward once onto a black square. “The only thing she would reveal-…”  
  
“With the right side of her face covered in bandages and gauze so she can’t close her eye for another week,” Eddie put in helpfully and pointedly (no doubt to make Jervis feel even more guilty), eyeing the knight Jervis moved a little too close to the out in the open pawn of Jonathan’s. Jervis gave him a glare that could light a candle and cause the wax to bubble over.  
  
“Because of the confidential thing,” Jonathan continued, this time touching a bishop and moving it to capture the knight of Jervis, happily pulling it out to set it beside his elbow, “All she would tell me was that you got angry, you threw the teapot at her and she isn’t mad at you.”  
  
“Really?” Jervis perked, sending out a pawn to its death.  
  
“That was her story and she’s sticking to it,” Eddie poked, finger pressing to Jervis’s arm to cause a bruise. No doubt it was a pitiful way of showing that, while Harley might not be mad at the Englishman for administering a punishment on the former blonde Rogue that everyone hated the Joker doing since forever, he sure as hell was not going to forgive so easily. True, Eddie and the rest of them didn’t much give a damn about anyone and were all mad at Harley for reforming without telling them, but woe be it to anyone that wasn’t (and WAS) Joker to actually get the gall to physically assault her tiny person. Jervis let the man proceed while giving Jonathan a look to make him go on.  
  
“Personally, I think she let out all of her anger on that possible intern that ran out of her office crying yesterday when I went in for my therapy session. I was a little surprised when the intern was soaking wet and Dr. Leland hugged Dr. Quinzel, but not really. It was probably good for Harley.”  
  
“And good for us, even if the intern was a fox who wasn’t wearing any underthings under her very curve-fitting black dress. For all we know she was probably into Draconian punishment,” Eddie grinned, finally removing his hand from Jervis’s person to bring it to his chin and visualize the crying wreck that had run past his cell on her way out. Jonathan moved his heel from under the table and stomped the other ginger’s toes.  
  
“Why wasn’t she wearing any underclothes?” The only blonde twix the three of them questioned—anything to relieve the tension of thinking about what he had done like all his doctors wanted him to do.  
  
“She thought the person interviewing her was going to be Bartholomew,” Jonathan explained, capturing a pawn, looking like he would really like to get off the subject. His teeth were clacking together and he looked a little disgusted with the thoughts running around in his head.  
  
“Yeah, I can still hear Harley snarking about how this isn’t Vegas in my head. There’s no angry left after _that_. No sir.”  
  
Jervis blinked as Jonathan took away his queen, still looking confused.  
  
“I kind of feel bad for all of the other interns she’s going to interview, though. Let’s just hope these ones are more willing to get into Arkham the old fashioned, soul sucking way that won’t have Harley breaking out the mallet.”  
  
“She doesn’t have that anymore, does she?” Jonathan questioned absently as the innuendo finally struck Jervis and the Englishman’s face lit up exactly how it did when he first came to America and realized a fag was not what one calls a cigarette anymore. Well, not anywhere in the state of New York, anyway. He’d found that it tended to vary from one state to another, but still.  
  
Eddie shook his head, leaning back in his chair and catching the sound of Arnie’s latest soap opera playing the strings at a key point that probably spoke volumes about the father of some woman’s baby or whatever, “Oh, but she does. I actually saw her take it out once two months ago when Joker got loose again and she dragged him back. Who needs a panic button when you’ve got a mallet weighed to the estimate of fifty pounds and two hyenas with questionable diets in the room?”  
  
Jonathan got a hold of Jervis’s King.  
  
“Checkmate.”

 


	14. Just Hang In There Baby

_-:-_  
…I do not mind being killed ritually, since I shall always rise again…  
-A Vague Poem I Don’t Really Remember.

 

* * *

  
  
_Across town, across the sky, almost like putting a hole in the black smog that is the Gotham clouds, Joan finds herself spotting the Bat-signal flipping on, right and bright in an acid color like that between the yellow the psychiatrist had seen in a book on the human condition once and the color her favorite green dress changed when mixed with two different bleaches and scented cleaner. It distracts her from walking down the halls of Arkham to the med-ward just until she gets to the door and sees who she came to say in the first place._  
  
_She supposes the distraction was a bad thing, seeing as Joker is, indeed, waiting with his wrists bound right and tight so the team of nurses there (with a guard holding his gun standing nearby) could remove his purple suit covered in red-red-red. She’s been used to seeing him covered in other people’s body fluid for longer than she’d care to admit, but this is something different. This is wrong, because when he’s covered in blood, bile, vomit, he’s commenting to nobody in particular about how awful it is not to have a tailor on standby, or how it would be oh-so-wonderful if Arkham was adjacent to a dry cleaner’s. He doesn’t care, usually, if he’s killed someone, he just makes meaningless (creepy-ass) small talk._  
  
_This time he’s just sitting on the padded bed, not struggling at all, and he’s cackling that low-almost-somber laugh that screams “I know something you don’t know” in the face of everyone in the room._  
  
_It gets worse when Joan composes and enters to greet him and she can see all of his sinfully white teeth when he meets her eyes and the laughing inhales and becomes giggles._  
  
_Joan turns her eyes for a second, and in doing so, sees Joker’s white gloves he always wears, taken off and chucked into a pan like a doctor’s operating tools needed to be gotten rid of after they were used, covered and soaked in more blood that has turned all of the whole of both gloves from clean, sterile white into a water submerged, communist China flag red. And there’s yellow (soaked in more blood) hair sticking to them, all cut up._  
  
_“Hello, Joker,” really, what else was she and the rest of Arkham supposed to call him when he’s stab the last one that had referred to him as John Doe and he wasn’t giving any hints as to what they should call him other than the alias that was and wasn’t him at the same time, “It’s good to see you back again.”_  
  
_It’s important to make sure that the patient cannot tell that the doctor treating them is lying. But what else could she say; that she’s hoped he wouldn’t come back this time and the police would have found him in the river, rather than someone dropping him off at the front gate half-sedated with some street drug that would lay any other person on their ass? Best to be polite so they don’t see how much one hates them._  
  
_“No it’s not.” See, he knows. “You’re just being polite so you don’t have to ask about the blood and hair all over me.”_  
  
_He chortles and breaks down into cackling again, and Joan can feel the bile rise in her throat that she’s been able to press down and repress for years. Three years short of a decade._  
  
_“…Oh, God, what did you do?”_

* * *

 

Shaking, shaking, waving her hands in front of her, sleep is cast off from Joan Leland as she rose from her pillow, the little blue and green alarm clock of hers thirteen minutes short of going off.  
  
Amazingly, the bile from her dream is actually in her throat and she has to choke it back with the phlegm that comes with every other morning before she actually-factually-literally tosses her meatloaf and blueberry-pomegranate juice she’d had for dinner the night before. She swallowed deeply and then coughed before rubbing her arms to brush off the morning air creeping in through every crevice in the apartment she lived in—wait, no, Joan had to keep reminding herself, she owned her apartment as of three months ago when she’d paid it off.  
  
Moving chocolate eyes along the frame of her (damn, sunny) window across from her bed, Joan lifted her hands to her eyes and rubbed the horrible little crusties out of them, annoyed with the one in the left that took some doing before she flicked it out and then proceeded to removed her soft, corduroy (yes, really, that was what it was made out of and had cost her half a paycheck to take home) blankets from her person to start getting ready for her first day off in seven days to go out and have breakfast with Harley before the blonde had to get to work and start interviewing a less-than likely to succeed prospect for an intern that had come all the way from England.  
  
Joan felt a little less than happy to get up at seven in the morning when it was supposed to be her day off, which usually meant she would sleep in until noon and then go shopping, followed by a big dinner from her favorite mixed-cultural restaurant that served both the coconut shrimp she liked and the chocolate-something cake that was something like ten-billion calories and had cause to make her run an hour on the treadmill at her gym later in the week. But, what could she say when Harley was actually offering to buy Joan (her former psychiatrist and the person who technically out-ranked her now in work) anything on a more…social arrangement.  
  
Now, Joan would admit that it was a little weird—verily, it was causing her to over think either just brushing her teeth, or brush and then proceed with a five minute gargle of salt water and then that really bitter mouthwash hiding in the cupboards below her sink because it tasted like the worst cinnamon had to offer—that Harley was actually willing to spend time with Joan that wasn’t connected to work. They didn’t have anything in common, like, at all. They were of different religions (as far as Joan could gather, Harley was an agnostic Jew and Joan was lapsed Catholic), of different academic backgrounds (Harley got into college through a gymnastics scholarship, Joan had paid half her tuition while her parents paid the other half), had different sexual preferences (yes, they had gotten into that both while Joan was treating Harley and when she found herself keeping an eye on her when she went back to work so she wouldn’t be alienated), and of differences in how they treated everyone from their patients to their friends and other human beings (Joan got along well with everyone, even the patients, while Harley had pretty much—while recovering and reverting to sanity, rather than not—turned into a bit of a misanthrope/high functioning sociopath that only got on with the _patients_ and her _pets_ and _Joan_ when she was feeling generous).  
  
Joan settled on just a toothbrush, repeated an excerpt of Bleak House in her head like she did every morning “… _They are caged up with the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach_!” before spitting, running her sort of Victorian style brush through her hair and then set about to look for some clothes to throw on and go out to face Harley at the address given to her by the blonde no-longer-so-mad woman.  
  
She really considered, for a good ten minutes of utter madness of the human condition that came to all women when they think they can pull off wearing a “ **Hang In There Baby** ” T-Shirt with a pair of Khaki jeans, before her alarm went off—ringing like a frilly, 1980’s spazz—before the dark woman put the monstrosity back in the closet and pulled out a simple pair of black draw-string pants and a grey tank-top. She could tolerate Harley picking at her clothes only so often. “ **Hang In There Baby** ” was something that would be too easy to ridicule.

* * *

 

“This is a bar.”  
  
“Yes, and a twenty-four hour one at that.”  
  
“ _ **Har**_ _ley_.”  
  
“I’m kidding, of course,” the blonde grinned with the snared cunning of a snake-oil salesman, looking Joan over twice and taking in the similarly aged woman’s way of bringing her arms up to tighten her oyster grey pea-coat so that she wouldn’t get the attention of the few drunks in their seats around the bar’s counter already noting how well Joan’s pants fit against her like a glove. “We’re going to the little café across the street. I work later today…The _look_ on your face, though.”  
  
Well, it looked as though choosing to dismiss the “Hang In There Baby” shirt was the very best choice Joan could have made in the last month.  
  
Joan gave Harley a withering look and spun on her heel—really as well as she could, considering she was wearing slip-on clogs that didn’t even have heels—back towards the door, gripping her purse more closely to her chest as the bartender gave a smile her way that wasn’t all nice and friendly with a touch of “hey, let’s have coffee the next time you come in”, but rather like a few of the emotionally abusive convicts in Arkham with a touch of “hey, let’s have sex in the lavatory without a condom” in the mix. Harley followed after Joan with a little skip in her stride that said that she’d gotten what she’d wanted to commence a better start to her own day.  
  
Was it really so hard to believe that Joan wanted to cry a little when she had believed the woman would be a little more civil? Huh?  
  
Harley caught up to Joan as Dr. Leland crossed the street to the mentioned café with little pastel birds painted in the corners of the windows, her blonde hair flopping in its ponytail up-do with the act of a sped up pace, tapping against her doctor’s coat like a horse tail all its own and that grin not leaving her until Joan lost her own huffiness.  
  
Opening—slamming—the door to the food joint open without remorse for the bell attached to the door clanging against the wall, Joan found them a seat and lurched into the bench, arms across her chest and still feeling annoyed, even as Harley waved the waitress of the establishment over and ordered French toast, black coffee, and the ‘Overturned Verdict’ breakfast for the both of them.  
  
Harley patted Joan on the head like she would one of her hyenas before seating herself, her grin lessening to a light smile that rubbed on the other woman a little less and made room for Joan to loosen her crossed arms and rest them half to her chest and half atop the table.  
  
“Is there a reason you wanted to have breakfast with me that’s not too, I don’t know, bad?”  
  
Harley shrugged, the waitress passing to give them their coffee before anything else, and the blonde started tearing open powdered creamer packets to dump the white stuff into her drink as Joan did similar with the blue packets of sugar.  
  
“I’m up by five and get bored fairly easy. Plus, I wanted to get your advice on how to proceed with Jervis now that he’s, y’know, apologized to me about the teapot incident.”  
  
The mention of the way and form and reason that there were still stitches and horse-sized bandages puzzling Harley’s face (especially around her eye) like a type of artistic movement that used strips of newspaper in wax got Joan to lose her interest in being angry about feeble trickery much faster than the breakfast and the coffee almost scalding her throat ever could have.  
  
God help her…

 


	15. Rolling Ducks on a Stick

_-:-_  
…No, really, I mean it. You pathetic, humorless, wage-slave drones in your veal fattening pens just waiting to be slaughtered like the cattle you are.  
-Gotham Central: Book Two.

 

* * *

  
  
The three young people had been waiting in the doctor’s lounge for the better part of three hours, left with nothing but three large copies of the theories of either Freud or Dr. Arkham’s own work, and their heels kept clicking against the floor, trying to drown out the foreboding silence. Which, as it seemed, wasn’t working in the least; not even a little.  
  
Among the three young people (all graduating the top of their class and then some) was a young Japanese man that looked bright eyed in more ways than one, already having gone through all of the books given to them and having had three coffees from the machine that broke down after the woman across from him tried to use it. His foot was tapping to a tune of something like a cross between country and rock and roll that rung out words through his head, but he needn’t bother with aloud so he wouldn’t freak out the women. Beside him, cane of warped but sturdy wood hanging on the back of her chair was a gingery brunette with freckles about her complexion not so different from meaningless constellation in the sky, hazel eyes looking up with minor anxiety at the stains on the ceiling that had long been there and turned into a dark figure of an injured rabbit if a person closed one eye and squinted; exactly what she was doing.  
  
Across from the both of them and probably the very oldest out of all of them (though, that was hardly saying much as none of them looked over twenty-eight) was a gorgeous red (red like the queen of Wonderland freshly back from a morning execution) head that couldn’t have looked more white than the Joker if she were trying, sucking on a blue mint she’d popped going on the hour before when Dr. Wu dropped in to tell the lot of them that Dr. Quinzel would be in just as soon as a situation in the lunch room was attended to. This of course followed by what sounded like Dr. Bartholomew screaming his head off and the poor Asian woman exiting back out, yelling in equal volume about Thorazine.  
  
Just when the man looked like he was about to say something, the door to the room slammed open, causing the freckled woman to jump higher than both the man and the other woman; all looking to the door to find who they had been waiting for storming in.

There was blood on Harley and it looked rather a lot like an entire bucket of pig’s blood had been dumped onto her, though not from above her head, as the stains were situated primarily to the area of her left shoulder and down around her navel, staining the (really very inappropriate for work) lacey tank-top that completely set off the mint green of its color and spattered along the frappuccino grey of her drawstring sweat pants. She stormed into the room growling obscenities under her breath and right behind her, holding what may have once been Harley’s white doctor’s coat (now really covered in blood and in tatters that would look perfect being worn by The Scarecrow) came Dr. Leland without her headband and without her own doctor’s coat (just her usual garb of deep gray skirt and sweater), hair in a little disrepair.  
  
“Harley, really, I wish you would go to the ER--…Oh, shit, hello there.”  
  
Actually being acknowledged, the three interns that had come to be interviewed to be certain that they would actually get some jobs for the asylum (Dr. Arkham seemed rather purposefully vague over their phone calls) waved absently over at the dark woman, unsure if they should say anything to the seething and obviously injured blonde presently whacking the broken down coffee machine.  
  
Taking initiative, the Japanese young man stood up and held out his hand to greet Joan properly, “Uh, hello. Hiro Okamura,” he intoned to himself before waving to the women with him, “Becky Albright and Kate Kane. We’re the interns that Dr. Arkham called up with the offer of jobs in internship as long as we all had an interview and were assigned patients by, uh…”  
  
When Hiro waved over to Harley—hissing foreign expletives as she pried the coffee machine door open and was going at it with both wrench and screwdriver she had pulled out from a nearby drawer—Joan smiled the most forced smile that any of the others had ever seen and pulled out a chair from one of the other tables nearer the windows at the far wall, clearing her throat.  
  
“Yes, well, yes. Now I remember. Ah, funny story; one of the inmates got out—“  
  
“Fucking coked-out son of a bitch,” Harley added in, taking her bare hand to pull out a large amount of sludge from the machine’s guts.  
  
“And we would like to apologize for wasting your time. We might have you come back tomorrow, maybe?”  
  
Harley walked over to the sink in the far corner at hearing that and flicked some water at Joan, “Don’t be stupid, Joan,” she growled, taking up a pitcher from under the sink, filling it with cold water as her blue eyes absently took in the possible interns and her fingers fiddled with her hair tie to get blonde tresses out of her eyes and off of some of the cuts along the grooves of her face. “They’ve been waiting here for three or more hours, I might as well just interview them here.”  
  
Joan’s dark eyes widened at such a given thought and she leaned in closer to her colleague, that pressured smile seemingly even put under more strain in the move, “Are you sure, Dr. Quinzel? Wouldn’t it be more, I don’t know, _**ethical**_ to talk to them separately and in a more professional space like your _office_?”  
  
“Why?” Harley smirked, taking the full pitcher and hauling it over to the machine where there was a compartment for the water where it would boil before being added to the coffee mixture. Normally a machine like that would have a small house that attached to a water pipe in the wall, but it was a cheaper model so the water had to be added in gallons by hand; for Harley, that meant dumping all of that pitcher and going about adding up to ten more. “News around the asylum spreads fast, and whatever they would tell me in my office would become ridicule and gossip fodder within the next week, so politeness doesn’t really matter. Actually, this would be a nice way to figure if any of them have a spine. Am I right or am I wrong?”  
  
The last question was obviously directed at Hiro, whom took a step back as Joan started rubbing the bridge of her nose and Harley bounded back and forth from sink to machine, little drops of water occasionally hitting the floor with a ‘ _splat’_ sound.  
  
“Let’s see,” Harley continued, glancing briefly over Hiro, before dumping a whole pitcher into its place, “You used to be stationed in Japan and referred to as Toyman. You’re an expert in robotics, engineering, explosives and any number of other mechanical things that don’t revolve around people unless you want them to. How am I doing so far?”  
  
Hiro’s eyebrow rose spectacularly, but he nodded, one hand coming to rest on his hip, “That’s right, but that was mostly in my file.”  
  
“Correct, but your file doesn’t say anything about why you went from being a little helper for Stupidman over in Metropolis, to wanting to surround yourself with Gotham Rogues who, as far as I can tell, because I am of the same general feeling, would take one look at you and then decide to make you quite miserable.”  
  
“Why’s that?” The gorgeous redhead with the vampire complexion asked, genuinely curious.  
  
The only blonde in the room (and probably the only blonde doctor aside from a slim trio of guys in the asylum) gave a blue eyed glance in the way of Kate, before answering the question candidly, much to Joan’s chagrin and humility.  
  
“Territoriality,” she grinned, the water in her pitcher sliding down the intended hole in the machine with a gurgle that claimed the water had reached the halfway mark, “Each sect of villains or Rogues, have their own district, their own cities. It wouldn’t do well for those from other sects to wander into another. It just isn’t done without some sort of altercation coming to play. I mean, look at what happened some years ago when myself and Joker popped into Metropolis to offer Baldy a way to get rid of Blue Boy? Half the city in rubble and a very ticked off pair of capes.”  
  
Joan gave a little groan as all of the hopeful interns nodded.  
  
“I got bored with the electronics thing,” Hiro shrugged, “It wasn’t challenging anymore. Plus, I’m not a kid, I’m nineteen now and want to do something—“  
  
“Important to the world?” Harley supplied, looking well like she might vomit.  
  
“Maybe not the world,” the brunette waved his hands in defense, taking back to his seat so the woman wouldn’t splash him when she tromped by again, “But, more for myself and a _percentage_ of people.”  
  
“So this is basically an experiment in humanity and humility?”  
  
A quietness settled over the room when Hiro nodded again, not denying such a thing at all. It made him seem inhuman to treat mental patients just to satisfy some curiosity, but Harley wasn’t kicking him out of the room after she finished with the water and put the pitcher back under the sink. Rather, she walked over to one of the cupboards near the windows and pulled out a few files, thick and heavy with paper.  
  
Dr. Quinzel then set the files in Hiro’s lap, much to Joan’s and Hiro’s own surprise, listing off what the files entailed, “Two of these are easy enough to treat, just a couple manic depressives that steal from various malls or shops to add rubbish to a collection of more rubbish and who got caught and sent here. One is a teenager that had a psychotic break because of his OCD. The last is a simple psychotic who knifed but didn’t kill a police officer who visited his house when someone called about his screaming every night at three in the morning about members of a cult trying to kidnap him and steal his organs. Clear these, and I may offer you brief sessions with one of the Rogues.”  
  
“I…You’re giving me the job?”  
  
“I didn’t hand these to you for nothing,” Harley snorted, moving back to the machine, waving absently towards Kate Kane. “You’re next Rose Red. What’s a woman kicked out of the army because she’s a lesbian want to do in an asylum for the criminally insane? Step-momma push you to get a job that wouldn’t take up all of her and your daddy’s money, or is this just another way to serve?”  
  
If either of the two interns had turned their heads, in that moment, towards Joan rather than the redhead Harley had just politically incorrectly insulted and beyond, they would have probably broken down on just how much more visually Joan’s demeanor changed than Miss Kane herself. The dark woman’s mouth went in the exact opposite direction of her eyebrows, the sleek lines vanishing into her hairline as her eyes actually became dry in an effort not to blink. She didn’t make any noise, but Joan’s silence could hold almost as much weight as her lectures. She actually seemed to forget—just for the time being, a moment at best—that Harley was injured and considered whacking her in the back of the head later just to physically come across what she might want to say, which was something like ‘ _Okay, my god, you just said like five differently offensive things that could get Arkham sued, control yourself for fuck’s sake!_ ’  
  
Kate herself just sort of inhaled a breathe and explained herself as Harley seemed to run aground of another problem she usually faced with the machine in the fact that the powder was almost out and she had to go digging around in the room’s cabinets until she found where the other doctor’s had put it that day, “You are correct that my stepmother wanted me to get a job, but she wasn’t very happy about my wanting to work in an insane asylum famous for housing some of the most delinquent people of Gotham in cells lined up in perfect rows. She really would have preferred if I’d joined some private practice after maybe some years of med school.”  
  
“What would your father have preferred? You only really care about his opinion anyway.”  
  
That time, Kate’s face did change a little, but not in anger. More like mystified confusion, in which the other two interns followed, eyes still watching as Harley found the little ladder kept in a corner of the room and scaled it to reach the highest shelf in the cupboards that had the back-stock of the coffee powder. It appeared that the staff had used up the ones from the previous night and day.  
  
“You couldn’t possibly know that,” Kate ventured.  
  
“Oh, but I can,” Harley smiled almost wickedly, though the smile of her previous life as a jester was put off midway to her ears so it looked like she was more in a state of sadistic S/M glee than anything else. “Your twin sister is dead and so is your mother. Your father probably taught you how to defend yourself in the event that you were ever kidnapped **again** , so that would make you a daddy’s girl at the very least, or a swimmingly good model for an Elektra complex at the most. You seem more the daddy’s girl, seeing as you joined the military to follow in his footsteps and would have done so if you hadn’t been reported for gay activity with one of your younger compatriots—“  
  
“That’s enough Harley, get to the point,” Joan’s tone implied there was no room for argument, only following the order disguised as a plea when Dr. Leland’s voice doubled in pitch at the beginning at the ‘ _enough’_ in her statement.  
  
“Anyway, like I said, your father’s opinion is worth more than anything as he apparently accepted your sexuality, so, again, what would he have preferred you did?”  
  
Kate still seemed a little put off that the former jester could know so much about her, but put the thought away for another time that was now, when she was trying to secure this job.  
  
The redhead shrugged, “He would have preferred that I try to join the navy, but I had already taken up psychiatry and psychoanalysis in school, so I wanted to see if I could make this work.”  
  
Harley slid the container of powder into the right slot and it closed with an echoed ‘ _click’_ that went on for a moment as she looked back at Kate, blue eyes looking over her model frame, but not really judging, for which Joan thanked God in her little corner.  
  
“That doesn’t answer all of my questions,” Harley muttered, going for more files and plopping them into Kate’s lap, “But perhaps some other time. Two of these are narcoleptics that have been thrown in here repeatedly; one for getting excessively violent after five nights without sleep, one who is violent anyway, whether he sleeps or not. One of these is a Sybil case with four different personalities, two of which are rather good at figuring out how to steal large sums from various banks in the country; she’s a woman, so be careful not to get stabbed. The last one is a teenager who took the insanity plea for killing his father after the old man sold him into prostitution to pay off gambling debts. Clear these and report back to me, same as Toyman.”  
  
Hiro coughed into the air, smiling a little at the blonde, “Um, I’m nineteen, so I’d really prefer if you call me Hiro—“  
  
“Not paying attention to you,” Harley chirped, eyes honing in on the last possible intern, Becky, who fiddled with the grip of her cane as Dr. Quinzel seemed to finally fix the coffee machine; grabbing a coffee mug from the cupboards that was all white, save for the black ink painting of a Spotbill duck family of four along the edges.  
  
“Miss Albright,” the former Rogue said, back to the group as, without putting any money at all into the machine (doubtlessly by her own design, which Bartholomew would complain about later to Harley, who would not give a single fuck) she filled her cup with the hot cocoa first and then the Irish cream to mix, “You were formerly a student of law until you changed your mind during semester. Any particular reason that comes to mind?”  
  
Becky rolled her eyes and traced a crack in the ceiling for about twelve seconds before answering, “Some of the lawyers that I met in mock trial were jerks that came from the same firm. They set the bar too low, or too high and hit on me the entire time. I took up psychology as a way to distance myself and found the subject much more to my liking. Plus, you either do right in person, or not at all, which ends a lot better than most court proceedings.”  
  
Harley took a seat with Joan on the counter, sipping her drink twice before finally speaking up again, Becky playing with a lock of her wavy hair.  
  
“You do realize that since you’re a cripple, Bartholomew probably only thought to hire you because Dr. Arkham would be happy for the tax write-off?”  
  
That time, both Kate and Hiro looked moderately appalled by the brazen lack of caring or affinity for kindness in Harley’s statement and tone and the unhelpful, downright mean smile that ruminated on the Clown Prince of Crime’s own red lips stretched to capacity. Joan had the goodwill to wind her arm around Harley’s shoulder and pinch the arm not attached to the hand that could splash coffee in her face after Harley squeaked at the sharp stab of fingers.  
  
Becky just looked at the blonde similar to the way a fish looks at a human that’s been tapping the glass of its aquarium tank for five minutes, “Yes, I am aware. It offends me, but I can live with it.”  
  
One more question was in order, despite that Harley seemed vaguely pleased at receiving the answer she might have been hoping for as far as any of the gathered members of the room could tell. Though, she at least got up from where she was sitting to get some files while asking, coffee set down in Joan’s palm, “Good, you have a spine, at least. But, well, how much do you pay for insurance?”  
  
Becky blinked a little as Harley grabbed the files she’d been looking for and set them down in the freckle faced young woman’s lap, the stack looking a bit bigger than either Hiro’s or Kate’s, “Four hundred a month.”  
  
“Get better coverage.” It was an order, not a request. “One of these is a sociopath, a woman. One of them is a pyromaniac that set three houses on fire. One is a man with a borderline personality that isn’t too bad, but he’s also a lecher who only talks to women doctors and I really don’t have the patience for that since he smells awful. One is…”  
  
As Harley continued to tell Becky what was on her plate, and then proceeded to tell the new interns (because, they were obviously there to stay) about when to and when not to bother her during work hours, about the percentages of interns that survive and about maybe wearing leather under work clothes in case they got stabbed in their first month, Joan leaned back and sipped for Harley’s coffee, pleasantly surprised at the taste.  
  
The bloodstain from where Lyle Bolton had stabbed at Harley with the sharpened end of a toothbrush before Dr. Quinzel had knocked him out with the wall earlier (really, it was hard to describe; something one had to witness in order to believe) had stopped growing, so maybe Joan wouldn’t have to take the blonde to the ER after work…

 


	16. Fond Thoughts

_What I assembled with those two was something dark, obsessive, erotic, and serious.  
-Charles Baxter._

 

* * *

  
  
_“Why didn’t you just run away? Everyone from coast to coast was speculating that you were dead when you didn’t come back in the first week and Joker was….in the condition he was. Even here when we’re usually more interested in stories about freak weather fronts, Rogues that co-operate and scarlet speedsters.”_  
  
_Shy lips completely lacking in rouge of any kind tipped the scale for a small smile that didn’t reach far, but left an impression to the being in the chair across from the still so very small looking blonde with her hair let down, sweaty, “I guess that can happen when you’re gone for seven weeks and your ex gets dumped on the front lawn covered in your own blood. But I couldn’t just…just leave.”_  
  
_That pause was not a pause in thinking, but rather, it was a pause to take a breath away from another shock of pain that ricocheted around her abdomen for a second before she could go on._  
  
_“Not to say that I didn’t think about it. I’ve still got some money, I can go where I want—I could go to India or the Congo to help the relief effort and make up for some past sins, or whatever. I could have changed my name, my face, let them think I was dead…”_  
  
_Another inhalation of needed air was taken, both for pain and both for thought, and the person in the chair on the balcony of another non-descript hotel the blonde had chosen for this meeting raised their own legs to cross and hold the clipboard between thin fingernails—bright green that looked like the ocean of the Pacific—and keep the wind from blowing away the precious notes. These notes would be worth a lot one day, when the blonde speaking would allow for the information to no longer become private. That was the deal they’d made when this totally clandestine thing started._  
  
_“But I love them all too much. Who would listen if I was gone?”_  
  
_“Even though they hate you at the moment?”_  
  
_The blonde continued to sit on the railing, but the smile seemed more ironic as she stopped breathing for the moment so the act of drawing in air wouldn’t lead to her abdomen feeling like fire for another thirty seconds. That was a rhetorical question if ever there was one._  
  
_Wind blew up and the redhead in the horribly uncomfortable wicker chair on the balcony of the seventh floor brushed her left hand over the pot of peonies so the wind and her hand didn’t strangle them._

* * *

 

There is nothing in the world—short of rapists and baby killers—worse than standing in the freezing snow, the temperature thirty degrees below zero, wearing the only black formal dress one has, a bushel of flowers in hand covered in newspapers to keep them from wilting, waiting for the clock situated on a band, on one’s wrist, to strike midnight. Because when that happens (and it has to since that’s the way it goes with guilt, secrets and lies), climbing the fence a person stands before will become completely necessary, considering the gates to the cemetery is locked with three chains and even more padlocks.  
  
“Last time I’m doing this…”  
  
And what’s worse is that, blending into the shadows so as not to be seen by the city of Gotham’s favorite vigilantes, there is an unsettling knowledge that the words that leave the young woman’s mouth are a complete lie. She knows she will be back the next year, probably under the same conditions, but in different clothes. Hopefully the clothes will be better, though; she never wants to wear the atrocious thing she has on (black stockings, classy black boots with heels and silver buckles on each, black pencil dress with a black Cardigan thrown on top to keep the wind away, a stupid floppy black hat that looked like something a Southern woman would wear forever after her husband died, and finally but not in the least less embarrassing, a blue—not red, no more red as long as she lives—scarf that if not presently wrapped around her neck and shoulders would touch the ground twice over) ever again.  
  
Finally—finally!—the beeper on her wrist struck midnight and began singing _Brazil_ as recorded by Rosemary Clooney. The newly regarded as remotely stable doctor at Arkham clicked the button on the edge of the clock, cutting off Rosemary because for one thing she hated the singer—the only purpose she served was annoying her into waking up in the morning—and for another, she really didn’t need to be heard before she trespassed in the middle of the night into one of the few nice cemeteries of Gotham.  
  
Harley Quinzel sighed in exhaustion and fished around in the little packet on the inside of her Cardigan. When involved in something that, if caught, could lead her to a rather unwanted conversation with her parole officer (or worse, the Bat), it was always a good idea to pop a little courage from one of the dozens of prescription pills her one legit, one mob doctor liked to give her bi-monthly whenever the holistic remedies she was put on ran their course and stopped working on her nerve damage. Fitting the god-awful flowers in the crook of her arm, she finally found her one bottle in her Cardigan—a half full bottle of amaranth colored pills that looked to have been given by Mob Doc, rather than Doc Thompkins, that often lead to paresthesial numbness settled along the groove of her pelvic bone and made her not quite happy, but less likely to scream herself awake in the morning if she took them just before she went to bed along with a sandwich or something—and popped the cap, before popping a pill dry.  
  
Tucking the bottle back into the Cardigan, Harley was careful with the flowers and shimmied over the black gates of the fence, clinking under her meager weight and then clanging together against the locks as she dropped down to the ground, snow flying up and hat dropping off her head to land against the nearest headstone. The blue eyed beauty contemplated leaving the stupid thing there, but it wouldn’t be proper and she thought it would be more respectful than stepping up to the place she was headed without the wretched thing on her head. So she picked it up, stuffed it over her head and made her way through the vague ruling ways of the headstones that she had memorized over her last seven years, careful to leave only the minimal amount of tread in her wake.  
  
She really, really hated being respectful to the two people in that one grave, when she’d never even met them—or wanted to—but then, nobody was yanking her arm out of its socket to march through the snow and uncover the newspapers around the Baby’s Breath, Snowdrops and Rosemary while the affects of the pill she’d popped worked its magic and started numbing up that horrendous burning that had become a constant in her life for eighteen months the next week. Then again, the one good thing that could come from this was Joker keeping his ass in holding and being sedate for the next week before he tried— _ **tried**_ —to break out again.  
  
“ _What flowers do you want this year?”  
  
“Oh, you know, Begonias, Snapdragons, Dogwoods, a couple of big—“  
  
“Jack,” she had hissed at him, drawing little attention from Joan as Harley dropped another small box of white/grey cake from the lounge into the moving box attached to Joker’s cell, so he would eat something, unlike the other previous days Bartholomew had tried to force feed him soup, “If you don’t tell me now, I’m not going and They can just deal with being dead and without any visitors, so help me God.”  
  
There was something like cooled off lucidity that reached into green-red eyes (or red-green eyes; she could never remember) for just long enough a moment that he could give a heaved out sigh, snatch to pick up the food she’d given him and whisper out just enough for Harley—not Joan—to be heard.  
  
“Baby’s Breath, as you know…uh, Snowdrops and…Rosemary… No roses like last time; they die too quick.”  
  
“Fine.”_  
  
Steps that stopped and echoed with the crunch and crack of snow underfoot. A little headstone that was curved where square edges would be on more expensive stones sat before Harley among an alcove of smaller or larger headstones that obviously belonged to people and families that couldn’t afford to be along another nearby hill, or single people buried by friends, rather than families.  
  
Cold air enters frayed and weak lungs that have gone almost into a state of disrepair after so many times of chest and ribcage being punctured by knives and bullets over the years; air folding back out into the heated puffs of white. Harley can still make out the linings of the name on the stone, and the mention of a being that never got to come into the world and live. Despite how much Joker wanted to wipe out the letters and the saying carved there “ _Beloved Wife Forever, Beloved Mother in Eternity, A Child Pure_ …” below the name heading the top with etchings of two roses, he never did it. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that, but she supposed it was a good sign.  
  
Bending over and pulling the flowers from the paper, Harley set them out in a configuration that could pass for an envelope of warmth over the stone, Baby’s Breath saved for last and set to blanket the shadow the headstone made from rays of the moon pressing down on any figure taller than a man’s open hand. Snow made it perfect for the flowers to stay where they were pressed and then the blonde—hating that stupid floppy hat on her head, loving the scarf around her neck—was finished enough to stand tall again. Although, tall was maybe not the right word, considering she balled up the papers like it was the face of that junkie skell on the street that had—for a lark—tried to nab her purse and was landed with a black-eye, courtesy of herself; her shoulders remaining in a downward position.  
  
The urge to walk away right then was looking very promising, but no, not yet. It would be wrong not to say _something_ on such an occasion/anniversary/the only thing that kept Joker sedate. Awkward feelings—she can recall the first time she had sex (horrible and painful), the first time naked in the girls’ locker room in junior high (pink panties with blue hearts, the gym teacher a fat sow that stared at her developed breasts), breaking her nose via a swinging door before her first shot at the Olympics—coursed through the action of her swallowing spit before speaking low and hesitant and _oh, god how she does hate being in a field of bones_ …  
  
“Hello there Jeanne…this is weird, but if I didn’t come up…well, I suppose you’re looking down on him rather than up, so you probably know that if I didn’t come I’d most likely have had to deal with an attempted breakout and a beating, so here I am.”  
  
She shrugged and the floppy hat fell off her head again to spin out and around in the snow like the figure of a disregarded tumbleweed, kicking up tufts of snow before sitting upside-down in a snow drift.  
  
Snorting, Harley’s blue eyes looked back at the headstone and her gloved right hand pressed against her forehead before she exhaled, “Okay, that came out bad. Um, well, uh….”  
  
She actually liked the thought that popped into the existence of her mind as she considered that taking to Batman was somehow easier than talking to the marker/representation of a human being that had been dead for something like ten years to that day.

 


	17. A Half Life

_-:-_  
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.  
It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular,  
so long as you have your life.  
If you haven’t had that, what have you had?  
-Henry James.

 

* * *

  
  
_There is nothing worse than going to a non-descript bar in the middle of the city that is far and away from the places one would normally spend time in to relax, have a drink, have a good time, with music playing on the little stage in the corner of the lounge. Sometimes it can be good, but often, those sorts of bands have to be the ones that sing smooth jazz (that makes certain women in the bar nauseous) with the stupid saxophone and those hats that cover up the leader singer’s eyes._   
  
_Sometimes, though, it can be ignored for something secretly (it was so very secret, as well) enjoyable to watch._   
  
_Dark skin and light skin dance together, fingers entwined while figures speak quietly far from the dance floor, once and a while kissing on the lips. Dark rouge rubbed off easily on lips that had only warn lip-balm or Vaseline in years, unless the owner of the lips had to go undercover—or worse, had to spend time with parents that constantly asked for grandchildren or at the very least a son-in-law._   
  
_The drinks before the two figures—women, beautiful—were both red in a martini glass with the olive sitting in the bottom of the glass with a little purple sword for a skewer, and a large beer bottle with a little head of foam curving up and out like a snake tongue that sat along the curve of a lemon wedge stuck along the bottle’s opening, squeezed. The women had pretty much finished, though, and were rising on steady legs (despite the heels the both of them were wearing) with the long haired brunette woman leading the ginger short haired woman out of the bar, one arm held out as if she was a gentleman to the other’s lady._   
  
_When the lounge doors shut behind the both of them, there was an unfortunate thing to see as a young waitress made for the booth with a cleaning rag and a tray to carry away the bottle and glass. A shadow passed behind and then along the waitress as her hand with the rag made to wipe over the cushions of the booth, cleaning away crumbs from the chips the couple had been eating, along with crumbs of pie they’d shared. The rag almost touched over a forgotten revolver in its holster stuck in a crease between the booth’s leather cushions, as well as a clean, bright silver badge, but was stopped._   
  
_The waitress paused politely as a blonde woman—maybe thirty, maybe less without the bags under her eyes that possibly added three years—leant over the back of the booth and picked up both gun and badge._   
  
_“Sorry, forgot this and don’t need to lose another,” the blonde grinned at the waitress who (surprise) smiled pleasantly and tried to meet brilliant bright blue eyes, but failed as the blonde went back to drinking at the front of the bar._   
  
_Just because the blonde was probably doing a moderately good deed didn’t mean she should just toss out the vodka-tonic-cherry-tequila mix she’d been nursing since straying into the place. The gun and badge easily fit into her purse and she could return it the next day after her first set of patients at work._

* * *

 

Walking up into the police station like an actual human being, rather than someone that had been dragged in more times than she could ever count, was not something that Harley wanted to do, ever. And the fact that she was walking up the stairs and up to the front desk of the M.C.U. just after her morning therapy sessions—while on her lunch break at the moment—and smelling like nothing but soap, coffee, and bread was something Dr. Quinzel never wanted to do in a trillion years.  
  
The good thing about all this—the only good thing, considering her ribs were hurting, she had a limp and her head was submerged in a migraine, all because she’d finally figured out a drink that would get her drunk, but in a happy way—was that she was wearing dark pants with her doctor’s coat over it and no face paint was involved that could make anyone who wasn’t Gordon or something recognize her and aim a gun on sight. She looked like a normal person just going up to the M.C.U. to speak with an officer over something stupid.  
  
Crossing the threshold of the stairwell, the psychiatric doctor stood in front of the little punk-looking redhead at the front desk and, rather like her old annoying self, because it looked like it would be fun with it sitting right there, clicked her finger on the silver bell. The redhead with her tiny pigtails, pink streaked dye at her roots and black rimmed glasses narrowed her eyes at the older woman, but simply put on an obviously fake smile.  
  
“Yes, welcome to the Major Crimes Unit,” the twenty-at-best year old greeted, teeth stuck together so she didn’t say something sarcastic at this woman she’d never seen in the unit before, “How may I help you, miss?”  
  
Harley chuckled and shook her head a little, doubtlessly looking a bit like the loony she used to be, but finally answered with her real voice, not giving away much of her accent at all, “Uh, I’m looking for detective Montoya. Is she in?”  
  
The redhead—Stacy, that’s what the little card in black and metal wiring on the desk said, perched precariously near the edge under her computer—could not have looked more surprised that this blonde woman was asking for one of the more respected officers in the M.C.U. but held her tongue and looked over at her computer; the mouse wandering through digital frames to find what out of the corner of the eye might be an eight-by-ten square sheet that had different people’s names all over it. When the mouse clicked over to Montoya’s name, Stacy looked back at Harley, not at all noticing how the blonde kept one hand secured to the leather straps of her purse balancing on her shoulder, the other hand in her white coat’s pocket, and how her weight was balancing mostly on her right leg.  
  
“She should be here in the next ten minutes. She and detective Bullock are en route, they have to drop off a suspect in booking, and then they—or Renee, anyway; I’m never sure about detective Bullock—should be here by then. I could call her cell and tell her you’re waiting. Is she expecting you for something?”  
  
“Oh, no,” Harley was sure her smile with teeth in it came out as very threatening, the way the young woman flinched back at her, “I could never presume to say she was _expecting_ me. Though I suppose a call to her could only help, as I am on lunch break and need to be back to work within the next half-hour if I can possibly hope to grab a bite to eat. If she’s not back in the next fifteen minutes, I’ll have to come back tomorrow to return some property to her. So, I suppose you should tell her to hurry a little, if you’d please.”  
  
Stacy picked up her phone from its cradle on the desk, the dial an old fashioned model that spun in a circle, her fingernail pressing clearly against it the number that would reach Montoya’s cell phone; the secretary’s eyes not quite leaving the body of the blonde as Harley just waited patiently, the sound of the dial tone picking up from where Stacy held the receiver to her ear.  
  
After three buzzing beeps, the other line picked up with vague sounds of Bullock in the background and what sounded like loud cussing that must have been the suspect they were bringing in, constantly repeating “Fucking pigs” again and again.  
  
“ _ **Hello**_?” Montoya answered, her tone betraying her annoyance from how her day was going so far.  
  
“Hi, Detective Montoya,” Stacy greeted pleasantly as the blonde before her raised her eyebrows at the sounds from the phone, “Someone’s here to return some of your property. Are you near the station?”  
  
“ _ **Oh, yeah**_ ,” Montoya spoke almost-pleasant and Stacy flinched and drew the phone from her ear for a second as the Latina woman roused her voice back at the suspect, ordering him to shut up, “ _ **We’re three blocks away and Bullock can do the booking. Though I don’t remember anyone that was supposed to meet me today…It’s not I.A. is it**_?”  
  
Harley shook her head as Stacy made to ask, speaking quietly so the secretary didn’t have to remove the phone from her ear, “No, I’m not with the department. I’m just here to return some of the detective’s property.”  
  
Stacy replied into the phone, “No, she’s not even from this department. There’s just some property she needs to give to you now or she’ll have to come back tomorrow.”  
  
“ _ **Okay, can you ask who she is? Please tell me it’s not my mother**_.”  
  
The question, though very low and hard to pick up from where she was standing, made Harley snort derisively under her breathe, stepping out of the way as a pair of detective made their way into the M.C.U. to work—caring not a whit as she caught their eyes trace her admittedly very pleasant continence, unassuming—and replied to Stacy, “Just tell her it’s Dr. Quinzel, that should make her hurry.”  
  
Obviously, Stacy didn’t recognize the name or she would never have stated the name over to the detective that was so obviously driving the cop car, “Um, it’s Dr. Quinzel.”  
  
The line went dead and, from outside the window of the M.C.U. there could be heard the sounds of police sirens as apparently Montoya and Bullock had indeed been around the corner. Stacy looked baffled at the phone before she set in back in its cradle to find a less amused looking Harley taking a seat in one of the hard plastic chairs that were always lining the entry to the M.C.U. for people who walked in to ask for help or give information on a crime.  
  
“Uh, she should be here soon,” Stacy more than likely just decided out loud, setting back to work as Harley nodded and began counting the seconds as well as every pigeon that fluttered to the window closest to the entryway.  
  
Twenty pigeons in the window later and seconds that rounded a little past three-hundred and Stacy looked up to the sounds of Montoya running up the stairs in twos and Harley staying still as Montoya came through the M.C.U. threshold, almost out of breathe and wide-eyed. It was almost amusing that her hair was completely out of its bun—at least for Stacy, who’d never seen the detective without her hair up or at least in a braid—until Renee found the blonde woman in her seat and drew in a breathe to make herself seem bigger.  
  
“What are you doing here, Quinn?”  
  
The name could not be mistaken, not with the way the blonde lost her look of reserved amusement quite quickly and how the detective was looking at the woman. Stacy almost felt her heart stop, but didn’t leave her seat—because how often does a lowly secretary stand right across from a Gotham Rogue without getting stabbed or shot? She wanted to see this.  
  
The blonde psychiatrist set her purse open in her lap and pulled out a plastic bag obviously meant for very large slabs of meat, containing instead a gun in its holster and a police badge that Montoya paled very quickly at the sight of. Her hands went to her hip, brushing over nothing but her pant line and black shirt edge.  
  
“I could be mistaken,” Harley spoke sedately, though far from amused anymore, “But I’m pretty sure these are yours. I’ve seen this badge so many times I could use the number to hack your files if I wanted to. These are yours, right?”  
  
Heavy footfalls echoed up the stairs that signaled Bullock on his way up, but neither Montoya, nor Quinzel, looked away from each other. Renee looked somewhere on the edge of screaming in outrage, but holding back because Harley looked too annoyed at her to be taken lightly.  
  
The tension broke when Bullock walked into the M.C.U. and Harley basically tossed the baggy at the detective, with just enough strength behind the motion to aim and land the thing into Renee’s hand, Bullock looking at the blonde with some look Stacy couldn’t figure that spoke volumes on the side of dislike, but balanced over to interest. Renee easily caught the bag and opened it to look over the weapon and the badge, possibly checking them for damage or…something.  
  
“Where did you even get this? Were you in my apartment?” Montoya hissed, Bullock still eyeing the blonde as well as his partner when Harley got up from her seat and aligned her purse straps back along her shoulder, something like expected disappointment crossing her features as she descended the stairs of the Major Crimes. Montoya followed after her, still outlandishly angry that a former crazy (possibly still crazy, despite her being for and away from Joker for something like eighteen months very soon) had the detective’s gun and badge—which was basically like having a cop’s self-respect without permission.  
  
“Quinn—“  
  
At the mention of her old name, Harley stopped on the second flight of stairs and glared at the Latina woman, “Either call me Harley or Dr. Quinzel. I’m _divorced_ ; I deserve at least that much. And if you don’t want to see me again, don’t go out to bars and forget your piece and badge where some moron can pick them up and use them against you.”  
  
That shut Renee up right quick, and when Harley began stepping down the stairs towards outside again, Bullock watched Montoya follow once the blonde, much smaller woman was outside the doors. He didn’t bother to follow his partner; he really didn’t want to be near the former loony and could weasel Renee’s explanation for all this later. For the moment, he would just get some crappy coffee and fill out the report on the scumbag they’d left with a couple of rookies to take a statement from.  
  
When Stacy looked like she wanted desperately to tell Bullock that she was going to take a cigarette break—she didn’t smoke, she was practically a vegetarian, very health conscious—but thought better of it when he glared at her.

* * *

 

“…Look, wait, wait! Please, where did you get my gun and badge? This is important!”  
  
Rather than slowing down, Harley practically canted the rest of the way to her car—rib, leg and head pain be damned—and tossed her bag into the back where her hyenas had been sleeping right up until they heard the commotion Montoya was making trying to keep up with their owner. They didn’t growl when the Latina detective stopped Harley from opening the driver’s door, but Lou did sit up to put his paws on the window sill of his side to sniff (and startle) Montoya.  
  
Harley, with all the patience she’d grown during her days dressed in spandex (yes, that required heaps of patience and she tried to at least keep that when she was still undergoing healing therapy) didn’t slapped and kick Montoya out of her way when it became clear Renee wouldn’t let go of the door. Rather, she crossed her arms and looked at the woman, speaking clearly and (oh, something to recall in later evenings) freaking Montoya out like she did everyone that didn’t really ever hear her real voice.  
  
“I got your gun and badge at some bar I went to in Alphabet City trying to get drunk or get lucky. Obviously I didn’t get lucky since I found those things. Why? I’d assume you’d be glad to have them back rather than having to write up a missing report. Or does this little hysteric event come from the fact that it was a gay bar?”  
  
Renee frowned and Harley got the picture fairly quick, pushing the cop away from her car so she could take her seat and start up the convertible; Bud still didn’t move—he was probably in the middle of a paralyze attack—but Lou still looked curiously at the detective.  
  
“A piece of advice, detective,” Harley said, much less aggressive, but a frown still etched in her features that wouldn’t soon leave because of the air of submission she’d had to put on in the M.C.U. that had frayed her nerves and made her so irate she’d have to make some of Jervis’s special tea to make her feel better, “Your life is your own, but if you’re going to get this freaked out when someone peaks into the keyhole of your personal closet, I suggest you figure out what takes priority. I was doing you a favor because one of my… “students” speaks highly of you and the Major Crimes.”  
  
“It’s more complicated than that…” Renee said, shoulders hunched and defensive in posture. “I have family obligations. I have a job I don’t want to put in jeopardy.”  
  
Harley’s car roared as she pressed on the break, making one last comment, “Be that as it may, think about your priorities. I really don’t want to come back here.”  
  
Montoya didn’t say anything and Harley took off to get something to eat before her shift resumed.

 


	18. Moron Sheep Herders

Sometimes, in the darkness of the cells of Arkham _(far along the corridors there is the sound of Jervis giving away little snores, the sight of some of Penguin’s lingering night birds flittering near windows, the actual feeling of relief when Joker has stopped laughing himself silly and finally settled into sleep)_ at night, strange thoughts and theories come. True, they’re not exactly helpful when what they might bring about is out in the world and away from the hand; but still they come.  
  
Jonathan lay against his pillows and found himself thinking of problems that may arise as his silent (they come and goes as he tells them, simply showing up in the guise of his lawyers or something droll) henchmen went about collecting data for his next escape. They had the times planned out and a way to keep Batman away and occupied, but there was also the problem of his old fear gas and who he may have to use it on.  
  
It is the job of a scientist to study what could be prey and what could be danger. When he was planning escape _(actually when all the Rogues planned escape; they weren’t really that special in those regards)_ people he may run into inevitably fell into the category of sheep or wolves.  
  
It was actually Joker who’d coined the idea, but Jonathan remembered Harley continuing it on even after the phrase had died of old age. Rogues were the wolves and the general public were the sheep; except for the doctors and guards which (here Crane grins almost dark and brooding, but not unpleasant to himself) Harley had delighted in calling Moron Sheep Herders, even as a doctor again herself when everyone was out of earshot. And it was accurate when Jonathan had to consider them over. They presided over all of Arkham like they were turning wolves into sheep, and that held a danger to it in fear gas with the “Flight or Fight” problem.  
  
This was what led him to staying awake some nights. If he planned to breakout on the wrong night and used his fear gas, he may wind up gassing a guard that was brave enough to try and fight his fears with his fists, which could bring about Jonathan being gravely injured. Or worse yet, in recent days with Harley staying later and later at night and more frequently to do as the other doctors asked (much to her deep regret and continuing annoyance) he risked running into her and gassing the blonde by accident.   
  
The Scarecrow growled from the inside of Jonathan’s mind and as the professor’s own eyes scanned his cell, he wasn’t so surprised to find his Alter leaning against his cell glass, arms folded and demeanor giving off waves something that brought fear to the citizens of Gotham, but little to the ginger on the bed.  
  
“Progress…”

* * *

 

The guards are allowed to hit patients, but only when the patient exhibits negative behavior that could lead to injuries on the staff or each other. The doctors can never, ever hit patients, even if they are criminally insane and could kill them if they didn’t fight back. Doctors can defend themselves with little things kept in the office like a stunner, mace, or the panic button that will call in the guards.   
  
All this is done so that the state will not have to write up the hospital lawsuits for endangering patients.  
  
However, if a patient is escaping and one of the doctors in being chased off of asylum grounds, or confronted with a patient on grounds not belonging to Arkham (about ten feet away from any one of the gates surrounding the place), only then may a doctor physically fight off a patient and be spared a lawsuit.  
  
From his spot on the ground, tasting blood in his mouth and feeling every single one of the broken joint sockets and bones given to him in the last thirty-odd minutes, Waylon Jones (Killer Croc) finds himself actually remembering all these rules as he looks up blearily at the blonde leaning near his head in a crouch (reminiscent of a five year old looking down into a babbling brook). He’d chased her out of the asylum as the guards and everyone else was dealing with the riot he’d instigated, she had only stopped twenty feet outside of the asylum gates; whereupon she had proceeded to smile at him sadly and beat him so he couldn’t presently walk or move his arms and he’d gone unconscious and found her staring down at him with the one cut he’d managed to give her above her left eye bleeding.  
  
“You’re not feeling too sick or dizzy, are you?”  
  
Two teeth Dr. Quinzel had been able to loosen during their scuffled moved as Waylon swallowed his spit and answered, his mildly southern accent coming off week and bungled, “I…A little…”  
  
“Mmm,” she nodded, looking over her shoulder back at the suddenly very quiet asylum that had previously been blaring sirens and blue lights in warning when he had been previously conscious. He suddenly recalled all the times inside Arkham since she’s started working there again that he’d beat her up and she never fought back, “Well, you promise not to bite me, I can carry you into the med-ward for some nice painkillers. I’m at the end of my rope with you, though, Croc. Think carefully, because,” she paused, bringing her pointer finger with the broken nail to the bridge of his eyes, “if I do help you out now, it means you will never pull this cage wrestling bullshit again.”  
  
The fractures she’d given his ribs could attest to that, so he gave a little nod, some blood roaming over his lips from the broken nose she’d also given him.  
  
“First, say you’ll never do it again.”  
  
‘ _It’_ he could guess, to mean never beat her up inside or outside of Arkham.  
  
“I’ll…I’ll never do it again.”  
  
Whether she believed him or not didn’t really show along her facial muscles, but she did have the good will to warn him before taking another position to make it easier when she moved him into the piggy-back position along the length of her spine.  
  
“Okay, now for those pain meds…”

* * *

 

Dr. Arkham’s head felt three sizes too big and gave the impression to his conscious mind that it should probably explode within the day, if not the next. If it didn’t, he would probably go home, have a quiet dinner, go over the day’s notes and then when he went to sleep, he would pray for his own death—preferably from something like a blood clot that would kill him in seconds; nothing awful, slow, taxing like a heart-attack.  
  
Steven Carlisle, a very good doctor at Arkham (before the incident with Poison Ivy, that nobody at all was supposed to talk about) had come back not three hours previously that morning. He was healthier looking than he had been even before Pamela had lead him astray, tan and with a hopeful smile on his face. Dr. Arkham had been quite pleased when the younger doctor had greeted the new interns with open arms, very few questions brought upon him about why he had been gone for over two years trying to find himself again.   
  
‘ _Why, though, must all good things here come so swiftly to an end?_ ’ The white haired authority over all doctors and inmates thought with a baleful hiss towards the ceiling, pulling out a rather large file docket of notes (post-its, envelopes, spare sheets of lined paper covered with coffee that smelled awful after three weeks in his cabinets) on the various members of the Rogues Gallery that he still hadn’t gone completely over in over two weeks; more coming in each day just to annoy him.  
  
His mistake had been not to tell Leland to keep the wretched blonde inside her own office, preferably with the door locked, until Jeremiah himself could have a word with Dr. Quinzel. Or worse, his mistake had been to not tell Steven about her until he’d walked right into her open door and found her dictating to Dr. Wu about exactly why nobody was to _EVER_ call the Riddler’s father as long as the (her words, he recalled in exhaustion and agitation of her leaving the damn door open _again_ ) ginger or the miserably-stupid-coward-rooster-brained-parasite were both alive at the same time.  
  
Then Harley had greeted Carlisle by waving and saying, “Oh, look, it’s Red’s pet sperm bank. Didn’t think he’d ever be back here again.”  
  
Sometimes (more often now than years past) Dr. Arkham really hated being the boss.

 


	19. Cinama

_-:-_   
_She looks at the clock on the table. Almost two hours have passed._   
_-The Hours, by Michael Cunningham._

 

* * *

  
  
It is completely insane and there is no way in hell that it will lead to any really desired results like all the Rogues opening up like flowers to their doctors about their problems. It is so entirely futile that it lacks any real backing, except by Dr. Arkham himself, who in such situations is the only opinion that counts. It is a try at something new, so Joan went with it and took the ball running to the Rogues in the recreation room because the fair blonde that had been bugging the rest of the staff about it (“ _How do you know it won’t work if you don’t at least make the suggestion_?”) for three weeks straight couldn’t well be in the room that all of her previous friends occupied—they would have bitten her head off.  
  
So, left standing at the front of the recreation room—in front of the TV strapped to a shelf on the wall with nails and wire—with a handful of loose sheets of paper, soft pencils and a hat to carry them back to Harley’s office in, Joan was pleasantly surprised when the Rogues simply looked at her in amusement. All of them were lined up around the place, which would have been a concern for Joan’s safety if four guards weren’t standing at the entrances with stun guns and heavy sedatives. Jonathan was the closest to her, in the ugly red barker lounger he used to read his books in ( _sitting in his lap, Joan could trace with her eyes the title upside down to read “Dante’s Divine Comedy”, yellow pages dog-eared and smelling faintly of dead bark_ ) and spoke first, curiosity never entirely his downfall.  
  
“We’re going to have required movie nights from now on?”  
  
“As a social experiment,” Joan smiled in total realization of how stupid it sounded to herself as well as the older professor. “So you all can get to know each other better.”  
  
Ivy looked like she had eaten something sour and was trying not to vomit from her window with the sun facing in. Jervis looked genuinely pleased at such a prospect (not a thing Joan could do about that seeing as Harley had said, specifically when going into the explanation of rules for this to work, that every Rogue was allowed their choice of movie. Any movie was allowed—even porn), probably thinking up his favorite version of Alice on film he would request. Killer Croc looked a little confused from where he sat furthest from the TV.  
  
“And the only requirement is that these nights will be every Tuesday and Friday, we talk about the movie in group the day after and everyone—including the doctors—get to pick any sort of film they want?” Eddie questioned from his seat with Jervis at the chess table, trying to find a possible trick in the doctor’s words or something. Joan had always pegged him as being overly paranoid and this was going far beyond the usual level of suspiciousness he was used to, so she didn’t roll her eyes at the ginger genius.  
  
“You can’t talk during the movies,” Joan added, remembering Harley’s words and trying to stifle the smile at the memory of Dr, Quinzel’s interns looking as befuddled as she during the instruction process. “And you have to pay attention. There will be group therapy following these nights, yes. But, the main point is the reason as to _why_ the individual chose the movie. Most of the group therapy after these movie nights will be focused on the person who chose said film.”  
  
“What if one of the doc’s chose the flick?” Killer Croc spoke up finally, his slight accent catching in some of the roots to his words, making them sound more foolish than others would.  
  
Joan sighed, moving the hat in her hand (a Bowler that looked remarkably like the one Riddler wore whenever out on a spree, except for it being red as blood and had a black strip of fabric woven around the brim) to her head so she could pass along the loose papers to every inmate. She would give them the pencils one by one, though. Security measures were what they were.  
  
“Then you can insult us or compliment us. This is to learn more about everyone, much to some of the staff’s deep regret.”  
  
That got Ivy smiling wickedly as Joan handed her the first pencil; the redhead was doubtlessly thinking about Carlisle and what this could mean for the chance to insult him in more ways than just the one pertaining to when she’d put him in a large fish tank to use as something useful for experiments. Joan didn’t much like it, but it got the plant lover to write down the film, what year it was probably produced, her own name and then crumpled it into a ball to put inside the hat that was no longer on Joan’s head, but back in hand to hold all the papers.  
  
“A quick question, doctor,” Jonathan said over his shoulder, Jervis accepting the pencil and swiftly writing down the film that had his mouth worked into a genuinely nice—almost childlike—smile.  
  
“Yes, Professor Crane?”  
  
“How many of the staff are likely to give their own suggestions for these movie nights?”  
  
Joan accepted a quickly jotted down movie from Eddie and moved back over to Crane, handing him the pencil as she answered truthfully, “Not many. Maybe three of general doctors and then the interns, but I doubt anyone else.”  
  
“And we’ll all be aware of who had chosen the film?” Jonathan continued, writing down his choice after a moment, before stuffing the thing into the gaudy hat.  
  
“That’s sort of the point of this whole thing, Professor.”  
  
“Joker’s not going to be a part of this, is he?” Arnold asked meekly from the far right corner of the room, far away from Ivy and wringing his hands which were unfortunately empty because Scarface was required to stay in Whesker’s cell during recreation so that it wouldn’t get crushed by some of the other inmates (or more likely the guards, as Harley had pointed out to Joan once with a deep frown directed at one of the younger guards after she’d taken him to Dr. Arkham because he’d left unnecessary bruises all up and down Eddie’s arm for mouthing off).  
  
Joan liked the idea that Arnold asked the question because he was more protective of the other Rogues than they were to him—sometimes—but couldn’t show it then as she gave the Ventriloquist the pencil and spoke while he wrote shaky letters along the white parchment, “I’m afraid so, Arnold. He was allowed back in group therapy last week, even though you won’t see him here in the recreation room until he’s allowed out of solitary confinement.”  
  
“Not for a while, hopefully,” Jervis piped up, Arnold dropping his sheet into the Bowler, the last one in that lot.  
  
Internal and quiet, Joan agreed with the fantasy loving blonde scientist, putting the pencils she came with into her white coat pockets as she made for the exit, the guards unlocking the door for her.  
  
“The schedule for which movies will be played during the sessions will be up in a couple days after we’ve found all of the movies. I’ll see the lot of you in private therapy later.”

* * *

 

The door is open wide and like a scream, the window inside cracked open ( _air freezing, chilling the environment of the office with the ten degrees below weather outside_ ) so that the little flowers in the shelves nailed to the walls could recycle the used air. Harley sat aloft her desk looking over the tiny scraps of paper that she had gotten from her interns (“ _Come along, ducklings, don’t be so shy. It’s not like they’re going to care about your tastes in film anyway_ ”) with her figure bent like a queen of zen, chewing on the wooden end of a pencil.  
  
Joan walked in with her Bowler hat full of paper slips, her other hand gripping a crisp slip of paper that had the film choices of the only other doctors in the asylum that had volunteered for this project Harley had thrust upon them and gotten a golden sealed ‘fine, go ahead’ from Dr. Arkham. The few doctors which happened to be Bartholomew, Carlisle and Joan herself, which spoke volumes about what the other therapists thought about Dr. Quinzel’s idea.  
  
Harley spat the pencil out of her mouth the moment the other woman enters, looking somewhat along the lines of embarrassed at being caught doing something only men and grade school children did in boredom. Joan almost laughed when Harley tucked her nose behind the thick green scarf she wore indoors if ever her window was cracked for the flowers and their health. It almost made her look like Eddie when he had the flu two years ago and Harley had wrapped the blanket from her cell around the Prince of Puzzles when nobody had been looking, to try and make him warm and less miserable.  
  
“The ducklings’ choices for this exercise were a bit surprising,” Harley spoke pleasantly, trying to remove the image Joan now had of her being remotely like her former self, foolish and too cute looking for how she was now that she’d reformed, “ _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_ from the cripple—“  
  
“Please don’t call miss Albright that.”  
  
“—If she’s working here, she can either suck it up and take it like a man, or she can quit. How many times do we have to have this conversation? Anyway,” Harley continued, eyes not bothering to look up at the affronted look Joan always had at the descriptions the blonde constantly nick-named her new students by, taking the Bowler hat so that the slips of paper didn’t fall out, “Rose Red picked _Clay Pigeons_ , which was weird, because it’s about cowboys and a psycho killer, which don’t go with her military brat persona. And the boy genius chose _Babe_. Who’d think a Japanese super genius would even be interested in ‘Bah-Ram-Ewe’ and little pigs?”  
  
“I don’t know. Maybe you could gather up the evidence of his liking the movie because he is still basically a kid?”  
  
Harley looked up at the ceiling a breathed out a puff of air that turned into a little white cloud and made Joan button up all of the buttons on her white coat to almost match up to the black coat ( _that used to be white, right up until Harley got fed up with the laundry mat always sending her massive bills to clean her blood out of it, so she took it to a tie-dye artist and had it turned into the color of pitch, the color of sadness, the color that never showed blood_ ) Harley wore comfortably in the lack of heat in the room. The darker woman handed the white skinned beauty ( _she was beautiful, still, even though Joan had noticed she was getting thinner and thinner as the months wore on_ ) the clean and not-crumpled slip of paper, taking minor delight in watching the skin around Harley’s eyes scrunch up at the titles the other doctors had chosen for the high-priority inmates to watch.  
  
“Bartholomew choosing _The Accused_ —not a shocker considering he fails to help any of the female inmates. Carlisle and _Absolute Power_ is even less stunning since Clint Eastwood swooped in to save the day. You on the other hand,” the blonde paused momentarily, leaping over her desk to the window just in time to shut the crack and prevent a heavy gust from swooping in to push snow into the room; the glass pane turning into a frost apparatus seconds after the frame slammed down. “… _Mermaids_? I never would have pegged you for a Cher fan.”  
  
Joan laughed. Just a single bark, a kind one, but it was meant and it was not spent in vain as Harley’s eyes broke into twin orbs of astonishment ( _a barn owl being faced with a horned owl, twice its size and as likely to fight it as it is to simply steal the food the barn owl was looking for_ ) and he back pressed to the wall in surprise.  
  
“I’m not,” Joan grinned, taking the pencil Harley had been chewing on and then set it inside the little yellow vase she kept all of her pens and pencils inside, “I’m a Winona Ryder fan. She has more personality.”

 


	20. Brightest Night

_-:-_  
Every new decision is the opportunity to do the right thing.  
-Joan of Arcadia.

 

* * *

  
  
_Deep green, silvery blue and magenta pink rivets the sky like a trio lightning bolts that would actually fit very well with the pollution that surrounds Gotham like a shroud. However it may look, though, when they turned in a circle through the skyline into three separate directions, Batman found himself frowning in the knowledge that he would be receiving a call from one of those obnoxious Green Lanterns in three…two…one…_   
  
_The vibration pager at his hip (the pager he’d given to the Justice League and some universal contacts) hummed to life against his Kevlar and Bruce sighed imperceptivity from his gargoyle overlooking the opera house that Penguin had entered with his girls Lark, Raven and Jay to watch **La Bohem** for the third time that week. His hand fingered the top right button and the signal connected to the speaker hidden in one of his ear shells._   
  
_“Batman speaking, can I help you Green Lantern?”_   
  
_“How the hell do you always do that?” Came Hal Jordan’s voice over the line, out of breath and causing Batman’s mouth to quirk into an almost-smile._

* * *

 

There was hesitation from entering her apartment for just a moment. Just a moment, because her door was obviously barely shut because of the broken lock and the wood dented into its middle that spoke volumes that someone had committed vandalism of her property, but really, the frozen bull’s torso slung over Harley’s shoulder ( _it was a great tool to practice kick-boxing in her living room, and she knew a guy in the meat market who gave great deals that liked to see if he could get her number while she hauled the dead animal to her car; always it was wrapped in clear plastic_ ) was making her writhe in pain under the weight and the hyenas were already trying to gnaw on it. She could deal with some punk-ass trying to steal from her if they were still in there. She had done it before; like swatting away flies.  
  
Lou was good enough to push his head into the door and open it for her while Bud went in first to sniff about for an immediate threat. No threat was close as he spun around and wiggled his rump as his mistress lurched forward; the plastic wrapped cow over her shoulder scraped the doorframe.  
  
She ignored her coffee table tossed aside by whoever had barged in—she was due for a new one in a month, anyway—and stopped under the large meat hook she’d bolted to the ceiling. Quickly, just in case she lost her balance in her new boots, she lifted the bound legs of the dead cow upwards and set it into the rim of the meat hook. In letting it go it just hung in her living room like a punching bag; the ice crystals held inside by the plastic would take a few minutes to turn to water in her heated apartment, so until then she could see what else in her apartment had been wrecked.  
  
The hyenas just sat on the sofa ( _both were fully aware that if they tried to nibble the cow’s torso before Harley went at it with hands and feet—perhaps to tenderize—they wouldn’t get the animal’s legs cooked and warm and for their own to eat_ ).  
  
Removing her black doctor’s coat ( _no time to remove it while meat shopping, never mind that she simply didn’t need to while it was snowing outside_ ) and setting it on her coat rack, Harley also undid her hair and slipped out of her shoes. Spinning around in a little sway, the blonde found that while her coffee table her been thrown to the wall, whoever had done it had left behind a no-tread shoe print that was rather large and made up of ice and soot along the length of her wooden floorboards and the like all through her apartment. Also, they hadn’t actually stolen anything. Her fridge wasn’t empty ( _like three months ago when some punks from upstairs had confused her place for their own, which lead to an interesting conversation with the building’s owner revolving around her keys and a locksmith coming the next evening_ ) and her nick-knacks were moved around, but not missing.  
  
That could be bad ( _if nothing was stolen, then that meant that they had been there for something else_ ), seeing as some of her furniture had been moved about on the way to… her bedroom.  
  
Her blue eyes rested on the hyenas ( _drool was pooling out of their mouths and onto the sofa; that would be problematic when she cleaned house in another week_ ) and despite their not being freaked out by any weird smells, that didn’t exactly prove anything. In fact, most of the strange people they’d met had previously been a friend, so any number of criminals could still be in her room ( _sleeping on her fresh, clean bed sheets, fuck it all_ ) and not raise a red flag for them.  
  
As an afterthought to walking toward the door to her sleeping domicile, she picked up the baseball bat she always had sitting next to almost all of the doors in the apartment and held it behind her back, stepping into the room slowly and just pleasantly. No need to freak out whoever might still be there as she flicked the light switch and her eyes adjusted to the cop-style lighting that she still hadn’t been able to fix, no matter how many new bulbs she used ( _painting her bedroom the same blue that was in interrogation at GCPD had not been a great idea_ ).  
  
…While she had been expecting a former friend ( _Ivy had broken out and stolen her office flowers, Baby Doll gone as well, Two-Face had been out for months already_ ) from Gotham, or maybe Central City, or maybe even Leslie ( _Livewire had probably heard the news of Harley’s reform, but odds were she didn’t give a rat’s ass_ ), she had not been expecting someone she’d only seen three times in her criminal career; spoken to only once. Verily, she had never expected someone to find her when he had whole universes to hide out in.  
  
Thaal Sinestro, former Green Lantern, current leader of the Yellow Lanterns and a master of fear (second only to Professor Crane) around the universe who often went toe to toe with many Green Lanterns at once was laid out on her bed, obviously injured ( _his uniform was in tatters, there was blood flowing from cuts along both of his arms, shoes tossed into the corner of her room near her bathroom_ ) and looking with eyes half-lidded at the blonde. He just looked bored peering down his nose at the woman.  
  
He didn’t raise his power ring to cut off her head, so _that_ was good.  
  
Harley worked her tongue around in her mouth, saliva building around her teeth, and swallowed to clear her throat before speaking, no doubt her real voice doing wonders to incite that raised eyebrow on the alien’s face, “….Hello…. Goodbye.”  
  
She shut the door quickly, not looking to listen to anything Sinestro had to say, and tossed her slugger behind the sofa on her way into the kitchen to preheat the oven and grab her hatchet and hunting knife out of her drawers. She would begin on her usual evening training with the dead cow carcass, wait an hour, cut out the animal’s organs (they actually tasted better freshly melted, anyway), make dinner and then see if he was still in her bed at around midnight. If he decided to stay the night, then fine, she could go out to a hotel or something. If he tried to tell her why he had chosen her apartment (‘ _Why not the Legion of Doom? Why not Star Sapphire? Why does it always have to be me that out-of-town villains flock to?_ ’ she thought, already forming a little headache behind her eyes) instead of a billion other places to, doubtlessly, hide from Green Lanterns, she would tell him not to. **Technically** , she was free to speak with him, but only if she didn’t _**know**_ he was still a convict— _known_ convict, whatever—otherwise she would be in big trouble with her city’s pointy-eared defender…as well as her Arkham co-workers…and the Justice League….  
  
She removed the cow’s plastic sheets and placed them on the floor so she didn’t stain her floorboards. When that was done, she removed her shoes and work clothes to put on her drawstring pants and a white gym shirt, thus proceeding to take up the knives from the kitchen and started stabbing the cow in the heart; the ice crystals gave little resistance.  
  
Maybe if she just ignored him, he’d go away on his own…

 

 


	21. Sanctuary

_-:-_  
If I went back to the beginning, I could start it over again…  
-{proof}

 

* * *

  
  
_The three ducklings that Harley was required to train and watch over (teach herself responsibility again, patience, life, as Dr. Arkham said this would help) sat again in the doctors’ lounge, each with their cups of coffee in hand as Harley—for what Hiro had counted as the twenty-seventh time since they’d started work at the Asylum—worked on fixing the coffee machine. There was a set photo in the middle of the table they sat at of Harvey Dent, Arnold Whesker and finally Jonathan Crane. Dr. Leland sat at a separate table in the back with a clipboard to write this little lesson down as it progressed so she could report it back to Dr. Arkham and the rest of the staff as needed; her own caramel coffee wafted steam out into the air for three seconds before the heat from the furnace swallowed it up into its own temperature._   
  
_“So, today is a lesson in debate,” Harley smiled sagely from behind the coffee machine, wrench covered in brown sludge that the three “newborns” ( **one of the many nicknames Harley was fond of calling them)** knew to be more of the backed up coffee grounds that none of the staff in Arkham seemed competent to correctly clear out for more than twelve hours at any given time. “Bright Eyes, you will argue in favor of the theory that Alternative Personality Disorder can be a good thing pertaining to these three individuals given their given history in their files,” she pointed at Becky, using the alternative nickname for the frizzy haired girl rather than her fallback of ‘Cripple’ of which Joan in her seat was grateful of while drinking half of her coffee. “Toyman and Rose Red, you’ll be arguing against this theory, trying to prove that, in fact, it is quite a bad thing that they have been diagnosed as such, given their histories. I don’t need to tell you their history, because I told you all to read those big, thick files last night when you were dismissed for the evening. Any questions?”_   
  
_All three individuals lifted an arm and Harley rolled her eyes, pointing at Kate Kane._   
  
_The redhead lowered her arm and flipped closed the file she had been looking over again of Mr. Whesker, his glasses in the tiny picture pinned to the file bright and making it impossible to see his actual eyes; even less so when both hands folded atop the file and her fingernails sat along his jaw line, “And what will this lesson provide us with?”_   
  
_“A new point of view,” Joan answered for her blonde colleague as Harley removed some of the guts from inside and grinned to herself because Joan was spot on._   
  
_Harley then pointed to Becky from over the coffee machine door, her fingers all wet from pawing at cogs and carriers of the machine itself._   
  
_Becky cleared her throat, “Why am I the only one arguing for their diseases?”_   
  
_“Conditions,” Harley corrected, voice echoing against the metal and plastic she was facing, unable to see the students and not caring to, “Not diseases. Ever say that in front of them or I and you’ll be facing mental or verbal abuse and scut duty for another five months, my dear. And you’re arguing for them by yourself because I want to see what those years in law school did for you.”_   
  
_The lame young woman blinked, but didn’t get the chance to ask more as Harley shut the coffee machine and pointed lastly at Hiro; arm still hanging in the air and his feet skimming the bottom of his chair like a fresh, but brilliant child in school. She did not look happy to have to answer whatever popped out of the young man’s mouth._   
  
_When Hiro’s arm folded back against his chest upon the table, palm dry and soft and not leaving tracks of sweat behind like most men that entered that room and stood in the presence of the Joker’s former partner, “Is it true that Batman and three Lanterns from three different Corps’ went to your apartment last night to pick up Sinestro?”_   
  
_If Harley’s teeth weren’t grinding together at such impertinence from Hiro ( **she had no doubt that he somehow had access to this information from some of his contacts—probably Nightwing—so trying to lie her way out of the embarrassing truth would be pointless** ) she would have taken note that Joan had choked on her coffee and was glaring heatedly at the young man. She would have noted Dr. Leland jotting down a note about talking to Toyman later about trying not to act like the blonde even if he was her student. But she didn’t and simply answered with a Great Grinchy Smile most unpleasant._   
  
_“None of them knew how to wipe their damn feet on my front mat and ended up leaving space debris on my carpet while Batman left mud and snow. Can we get on with your lesson now, Nosy Parker?”_   
  
_“Sure,” and the young man shrugged his shoulders with a smug smile at getting the answer he wanted as Harley sat up on the counter ( **legs long and beautiful even if nothing else of her was even pretty anymore, no matter what and in those black stockings** ) and she cleared her throat. It would be a specific enquiry lesson that they would all doubtlessly suffer through; but they would be all the better for it if the way their boss was swinging her legs left to right, slip-on clogs dropped to the floor, heels tracing the lining of the counters._   
  
_“Alright, Miss Albright: let’s start why it is a good thing that Professor Crane has the Scarecrow. And let’s remember that you’re Pro, not Con. I won’t tolerate anything else.”_

* * *

 

 _ **{The night before**_ …}  
  
She was more surprised by the fact that the buzzer on her door sounded off, than she was by the fact that it was after midnight and there were three very bright lights apparent at the stoop of her building, luminous even from her window. It meant that Batman with the Lanterns he’d doubtlessly brought to tag along were good enough not to bypass common courtesy and simply break down her door or window.  
  
Sighing, the blonde renter of the apartment set down her freshly cooked liver and premium steak ( _the carcass she’s gone at until a little after eleven still hung from its hook in her living room right across from her, stomach carved open with her dainty and precise hands, but missing most of its organs, the stumps that used to be where its back legs were dripping blood unto the plastic below it every five minutes; the hyenas were happily gnawing at those legs Harley had cooked over her open flame stove_ ) across from the set of erotica she had laid out to categorize and file after her meal and crept over to her buzzer. It wasn’t like she could just ignore them to make them leave on their own.  
  
It was already pretty obvious that tactical plan didn’t work for her.  
  
Finger on the button so hard that the little indented circle would doubtless leave a full moon circle on her skin, the buzzer opened the connection to the building’s front door, “Hello?”  
  
“Dr. Quinzel,” was the greeting of the Dark Knight, his own finger on the button at the front, three figures behind him indeed glowing like the Christmas lights left on bar house buildings all year long in certain places less than deserving of remembered names; giving him such a headache it was ridiculous to imagine, “Some associates and myself would like to come up and have a small word with you, if that’s alright?”  
  
Not as though he would care if it wasn’t, but at least he made the attempt to seem pleasant at such a late hour.  
  
Harley didn’t even answer, she simply pressed her hand to the large button besides the one for the telecom and the door downstairs unlocked.

“Just come up slowly, please,” she muttered as she counted to five before letting go of the pressure on her buzzer, walking back over to her bedroom door to knock on the wood in a succession of three tiny little beats, hoping that it wouldn’t piss the alien inside off too much more than it had earlier when he had been dozing off and she had offered him a hot plate of some of the lasagna she had left over from the night previous, as well as the heart and tongue of the dead beast on its hook. He’d taken it and offered explanation for his coming to her little abode, but she’d declined with the recitation of ‘ _La-la-la-la! I don’t want to know! I can’t hear you! Please don’t tell me! La-la, la-la, LA-LA_!’  
  
It was humiliating that she had to request to go into her own damn bedroom, but she ignored any indignation in the pleasant recalling that he’d complimented her let down hair ( _somewhat still choppy from last year’s debacle of being shorn; not much she could do about it seeming as if she was trying to pull off a Brittany Murphy showcased in ‘_ _ **The**_ _**Dead**_ _**Girl’**_ _look after the actress got cut up and left in the wilderness_ ) and her no longer wearing clown makeup. It was nice to get compliments, even if it was by the leader of the Sinestro Corps after breaking in her door and then claiming her bedroom (clean sheets, fresh smelling—perfect, finally) as his personal recuperation den.  
  
There was a deep, rough cough that echoed beyond her door before Sinestro answered, sounding more tired than he had earlier. Perhaps she’d woken him up, but this couldn’t wait; she didn’t want an all out fight between Redskein ( _it was fun to call him that; his given nickname she’d bestowed him after the first time they’d spoken in the Legion of Doom and he’d spoken to her like a person, doubtless, because of her having to wait in the makeshift cafeteria with both eyes blackened with barely non-swollen bruising and Joker harassing Luthor about something stupid in the conference room. He seemed to like it enough_ ) and the Lanterns ascending her apartment stairs. Personally, she was hoping that one of her pathetic, stoner, grunge metal band playing neighbors popped out and spooked them enough to strike up a conversation; at least that would buy Sinestro some time to ready himself in case of confrontation.  
  
“Yes, you can come in, I’m decent,” he said; her opening the door without waiting for him to finish that sentence and being very swift to pick up her thick glass plate and the half-empty imported soda bottle from where he’d set it on her side table when she’d dropped in half an hour previously to give him some torn-up sheets and peroxide that he sported as she whispered to him.  
  
“There are some people coming up here to see you,” she didn’t make eye contact with him, picking up the fork and knife that had fallen onto the table, his being too busy to pick it up earlier when he’d removed his tattered suit and set about to use her pre-offered sheets to tie and fasten his injuries.  
  
Sinestro opened his mouth, eyes getting a little more awake, ( _strange, how she paid more attention to his face than how he was only wearing the torn sheets for his upper torso as bandages and as a temporary shift around his waist that left little to her rather spot-on imagination_ ) but she set her cup onto the plate she held carefully to keep from spilling some of the meat’s juice onto her carpet, other hand lifting to foil him from speaking—or worse, charging his ring.  
  
“I just want you to be aware that though they’re coming up, I won’t grant them access into my home until they explain exactly why they want you to go with them.”  
  
She stepped back over to the door and past the frame of the entrance, closing the door until there was an inch of hollow space that allowed her hand to travel up to the light switch and make it dark within the bedroom, only a sliver of light from her living area slipping in and traveling the room to slip across Sinestro’s dark red complexion, “Just stay in here and be quiet. I don’t want ANY of you lot breaking my stuff.”  
  
The crack of the door opening remained and Sinestro ( _he didn’t know why he was in that room, in that apartment, in that particular city, other than for the reasons his ring had given him that didn’t make a whole lot of sense_ ) quietly sat on the edge of the bed. He would keep within hearing range of whatever was said, but out of the immediate line of sight if anyone indeed came into the apartment…

* * *

 

T _he sound of one hand clapping filled the room as both Hiro and Kate looked wiped from the intense session of this little debate that Harley had set before them; Becky having come to the end of her recitation of good reasons for multiple personality disorders as the patients in the Rogue gallery conceived them to be. It was a long-winded hour sitting and listening to all the facts (_ _ **Joan had to refill her coffee twice and had written on four pages of her notes in a frenzy; it was a happy event to get so much useful information from the young minds Harley had chosen for internship, a drastic change from what went on inside the walls of Arkham among the other doctors. Dr. Leland didn’t look angry anymore about Harley getting the young people to do this**_ _) presented to the people of five, but it certainly wasn’t boring.  
  
Harley jumped off of the counter and started moving the papers back into their files, mouth in as neutral a position as could be and making all three of her students seem on edge with the quiet that not one of them assumed the blonde to be capable of for long periods of time.  
  
When nothing was said even after Dr. Quinzel had picked up all the files and set them beside Joan so Harley herself could fill her coffee and then proceeded to pop four silver coins into the vending machine adjacent to the doors to the room so she could eat one of the chocolate muffins, Hiro (_ _ **he had a long attention span, actually, but the woman made him nervous and speak up at the first sign of not getting what he wanted**_ _) questioned, “Well?”  
  
Harley sank a heavy gulp of her drink, the heat dousing her throat raw, but leaving no hoarseness when she replied, “Well, what?”  
  
Kate interrupted the second Toyman, her army training failing her as her own annoyance at this little session took root (_ _ **she had felt she and Hiro had made the better argument, but quite frankly, it was the woman who had previously been Harley Quinn that had been judging them, they ALL knew who she was going to agree with**_ _) in the back of her skull and drilled into her head to take the nuts of a twitch and grow into a full bloom migraine, “Well, who won this? What’s the punishment of the loser? What does the winner get?”  
  
Harley smiled there, bowing down so her head was level with where her colleague sat behind the children, “Explain the situation, Joan.”  
  
Ugly cracking sounded as all three interns looked back over their shoulders at the other doctor, tidying her area of the table up and seeming most appeased to have something to give to Dr. Arkham that wasn’t completely useless to the asylum, “You don’t get anything. Nothing happens to you. This is just a learning exercise to open your brains and broaden your horizons in the most unique of ways that they don’t teach in college for asylum internships.”  
  
“God only knows why,” Harley said sarcastically, drawing some more papers from a file cabinet, these ones smaller in number. “But, if it makes you feel any better, now you get to help me draw up to plans for the video nights scheduled for the patients. Doctor’s choices, then the patients, then your lot. Everyone gets a drink at the trough.”  
  
“…Why?” Becky asked, completely exasperated from her own spot, hands clenched tight around the coffee cup in front of her (_ _ **orange, little red crows along the handle**_ _) enough so that the tips of her fingers were white, striped with red.  
  
“Because she says so,” Joan stated helpfully, notes tucked into her whitecoat pocket and notepad under her arm, “And I’ll be the one to analyze it for fairness later, so please make sure your hand-writing is legible. I hate going blind on paperwork.”  
  
All of the interns (_ _ **Becky, freckles going deep red so that it looked as though she was left in the sun for three days straight, Hiro with his hands raised in exasperation, Kate weaving her hands through her hair**_ _) made to say something about that, but the doors to the lounge swished closed as both Joan and Harley exited, leaving no room for debate_.

* * *

 

 **{The** **Night** **Before** …}  
  
Soda poured down the drain of her kitchen sink, leftover scraps put into Bud and Lou’s food bowls, dishes tucked neatly into soapy hot water to soak for however long the next conversation/confrontation would take, and then the knock at her door. Harley took a deep breath, counted to five, walked over to the entrance to her entire abode, never at all minding the still hanging carcass of the cow in the space of sight between both her front door and bedroom door that could at least re-direct the attention of the unwanted coming with arms bared and ire boiling.   
  
She really hoped she could pull off keeping them outside; she liked the way her apartment looked and didn’t want it ruined too soon.  
  
Breathing in and standing erect, the blonde opened the door to find, indeed, the Dark Knight himself, as well as Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Star Sapphire Carol Ferris ( _Harley could actually see her face, there was no mask and she actually looked in her right state of mind; but, then, she hadn’t started spouting in that completely Children of the Corn way she often did when engaging with someone of the same sex, just yet_ ) and some Blue Lantern that was something like nine feet tall, looked like a cross between a glow worn, fish and a human, and dwarfed Batman; all the while smiling at her.  
  
She was actually proud when her voice didn’t revert into its old ways, didn’t crack at the end and she didn’t stop looking Batman directly in the eye, “Hello. Is there something you wanted?”  
  
“Dr. Quinzel,” Batman greeted in that way that woman had come to recognize as his no-nonsense tone, that shadow of his seemingly larger and trying to get past the invisible line that separated her private domicile and the hallway, “We have reason to believe that the leader of the Sinestro Corps is here. May we come in and speak with him?”  
  
“Not yet.”  
  
( _Not yet; the way she said it was enough of a reason for the inside of_ _ **the**_ _Batman’s brain to stop firing off synapses and revert to simply clicking off a beat of Morse Code that all amounted to nothing. Not yet_.)  
  
Under his cowl, and hardly enough for anyone to notice if they weren’t one of his Rogues, Batman blinked. He blinked and it took him five seconds to find something to say that wasn’t entirely stupid and useless. Even then, it came off a little less than what he would have liked in front of three of the more powerful beings in the universe that were counting on him (Saint Walker, the really tall Blue Lantern’s words) to be the ambassador between what they perceived to be two hostiles.  
  
“…Why?”  
  
Harley shrugged and gave a delicate smile, leaning against the doorframe, “I would like to know why he came here all roughed up first. And I’d like some assurance that this little peanut,” she pointed to Hal whom turned a beat red she hadn’t seen on a while, “Isn’t here intending to take Redskein off to some ridiculous place without his consent.”  
  
“Harley, that’s really not your business.” Carol stated, looking rather amused herself at the face Hal made at the short blonde woman.  
  
The psychiatrist shrugged again, this time leaning over towards her coffee table to pick up her eight inch long, serrated Rambo knife and started cutting off the dead animal on the hook’s head to steer the conversation into a more manageable zone for herself; the door left wide open but her demeanor stating that if they tried to take a step inside, they would be in for something nasty, “It’s my business if you attempt to cross my threshold without my permission and try to forcefully take an associate of mine while he has claimed this place as sanctuary. Doubtlessly, if you tried to do that, it would be with those rings and, doubtless, you would end up breaking some of my belongings and even the apartment proper. And make no mistake, if you tried any of that—especially entering my home and breaking my things; I would have the law on my side for once in that I would be allowed to assume you all as intruders, which would allow me to knock the crap out of all of you.”  
  
The knife, large as life and twice as deadly as even the mallet hidden behind her sofa with her slugger and just begging to be used within the decade, cut precisely into the cow’s jugular and made a squelching noise not dissimilar to when someone takes a dull butter knife to the cellophane that binds store bought chicken. All three humans and the Blue Lantern took a small step back when she made a triumphant noise in the back of her throat and managed to hook the knife behind the bone that connected bovine skull to neck.  
  
“And Carol, you above all people know that I just need a long enough moment to cut into your hands and take your rings to win any kind of fight with Lanterns of all people. So come on, talk to momma.”  
  
Inside the bedroom ( _still, it was dark, save for that one sliver of an opening that allowed Sinestro to grin vaguely when Harley gave a little yank on her knife and sent the dead animal’s head towards the plastic it had been wrapped inside; blood splatting all about in clusters on dead tissue that Sinestro could imagine made Saint Walker out there sick to his stomach_ ) and lightly tracing the outline of the symbol on his ring, Thaal Sinestro was starting to understand why his ring had told him, injured and bleeding and desperate, that the apartment he now stood in was 87.9% safe to stay in while empty, and 91.9% safe while that woman occupied it.  
  
He knew there was a reason ( _in his gut, which when it came down to most things, was just right whenever he was on Earth_ ) some years back, that while he was with the Legion of Doom, he had spoken to the pathetic looking thing that Joker took his rage out on, who at the time sat alone in the cafeteria. There was a reason, even if at the time she came off more as a victim than anything else.  
  
Sinestro’s eyebrows rose as he heard and barely could make out Harley’s hyenas stand to attention when Jordan tried to breach the doorway and Harley kicked the head of the cow at the Green Lantern so that in landed just in the front door’s threshold and flung in the air blood drippings that not only stained the carpet outside, but Jordan’s uniform along the toes of his feet. Staining Batman’s, Carol’s and Saint Walker’s lower clothing with red drops no bigger than a trout’s eye similarly.  
  
The tall, proper Sinestro grinned in shadow as his ring lit up just enough to inform him that the safety level of the immediate perimeter had gone up to 92%.  
  
‘ _Not a victim anymore, though_ …’ he contemplated, smiling even more.

 


	22. That Damn Brownie

_-:-  
_ _It's a...cake-like object made with some sort of...prune crap substitute for sugar._  
-The Closer.

 

* * *

  
  
Honestly, Harley really didn’t want to be in the tiny little shop ( _it was yellow and black everywhere with at least thirteen sky-lights looking down on the shoppers, blinding them easily and made the temperature unbearably hot even in winter_ ) in one of the main Gotham shopping districts with her legitimate doctor ( _Leslie Thompkins, nicest woman alive, but difficult to get to leave individuals alone_ ) and Selina Kyle. It was odd for the blonde any way she looked at it, and that was saying something since she was there because they’d dragged her to the place to fill out her new pain management prescription.  
  
The pain she’d been in since she’d left Joker the year and a half before had gotten to the point where most—if not all—of the meds she was on were practically useless and created too much of a numbing feeling that was a side effect of the anti-venoms and protective serums all the Rogues had given her at one point or another. It was interfering with her personal life ( _days, she’d spent days out buying large bags of ice so she could just rest, chilled in her tub in frozen abandon_ ) as well as her work ethic ( _she’d snapped at too many of the other doctors too often in the last week; Dr. Arkham kept getting letters to his office about her_ ) and Joan had dragged Harley in to be checked out by her doctor for something strong enough to at least make her less aggressive ( _though, the words she’d used had been more likely to secretly phrase out, ‘she’s being more of a Godless bitch than usual, can you make her less of one?_ ’).  
  
The three women at that moment were inside a legal Marijuana dispensary because Harley had been given a Medical Marijuana card by Dr. Thompkins herself the week before and had _**refused**_ to use it.  
  
Drastic times, drastic measures and Harley still had to be pushed when the officials at the dispensary desk had buzzed them in. She looked less than comfortable when she actually saw what was available within the glass cases along the walls that showed each type of medical ganja in its natural state before any patient used it. Selina had commented that Harley looked like she was seeing an old lady pole dancing instead of her ticket to being pain free.  
  
Dr. Leslie simply walked along the shelves with Harley, pointing out and drawing along long sentences about each plant and what it would do with her. The white-haired woman didn’t like forcing Dr. Quinzel to do this, but weeks had been building up, the pills had been giving less and less affect to her system, about as useful as a child’s writing desk submerged in a swimming pool ( _Leslie had looked over the always re-opening scabs and cuts, thick scar tissue making the unhealthy woman even more unappealing to look at naked on her clinic’s sterile white papered exam table in the bright yellow lighting and leaving trails of blood in her wake that looked similar to tire treads in the sand because of the thick wire needed to treat her stitches; pools of pain kept settling back in Harley’s abdomen that left her in a constant state of insomnia and unable to eat anything except for the thinnest soup. Her hair, that was still growing back from being shorn, hung lank in her ponytail like it was drenched in grease from an inability to shower without getting stinging water in the marks along her back_ ) and Leslie would not tolerate the psychiatrist going back to that mob doctor for something that was as likely to kill an average human being ( _not Harley, of course; poison she could handle, just not the dizziness_ ) as it was to give the other even a modicum of relief.  
  
“Might you try the Skywalker?” Selina suggested, pointing out the little card attached to the front of the case that showed the “grass” in a dried state, scattered along the mirror that made up the case’s bottom, her fingernail tapping the glass along with the skin of her pinky, “I hear from friends that it really is awesome in the right amount.”  
  
Harley gave Selina a squinted look, “What friends? Who are these friends you speak of?”  
  
Selina spun on her heel and coughed as she looked over another case of marijuana, “Well, you know…the ones in the Gem Cities. The not-villains, but the “bad guys” with morality and stricter rules.”  
  
“Flash’s Rogues? Are you kidding me,” Harley snorted—which she regretted swiftly as she could feel the twenty-two stitches that made up a rather nasty old wound along the curve of her right shoulder blade pinch against her enflamed skin beneath the black clothes she had to wear a lot more often, “You told me that Cold—“  
  
“Captain Cold,” Selina said, pointedly and with extreme prejudice to the blonde’s tone as Leslie tried to block out their conversation and quietly went up to the counter to ask one of the cashiers ( _actually, he was one of the owners of the establishment, contrary to what anyone thought of his nose ring, afro and his baggy shirt colored that of the most atrocious of blues; his age no more than twenty-four_ ) for the best brand that could be made with brownies ( _she knew from experience that Harley would never willingly light and smoke anything, especially if it left an odor that people could detect no matter how often she washed her clothes or what fragrant perfume she wore_ ).  
  
“Leonard,” Harley went on, referring to Central and Keystone’s chief Rogue’s real name to iron out the weird respect Miss Kitty had for that lot ( _which wasn’t to say that Harley didn’t like them a little, it was just that in her minor meetings with them, most of them had only rolled their eyes at her and stared at her skin-tight uniform that did wonders to accentuate her chest_ ) since forever, “Disapproved of any of those guys using drugs.”  
  
“He does,” Selina clarified, feeling a little on the spot as Harley placed her hands to her hips and continued to look unconvinced while glaring daggers at Leslie purchasing a set of marijuana in pills as well as one brownie Harley had a feeling would be stuffed down her throat as soon as they left the shop to go and get lunch, “But since marijuana has been kinda legalized he’s been forced to sometimes use it to treat Mirror Master when he’s in withdrawal from heroin and other stuff.”  
  
Harley closed her eyes and knew that this debate was lost on her side as she remembered the second Mirror Master from the last time that Joker had gone to Central in hopes to nab Flash and use him for the bait to lure Batman into a death trap. It had not been one of Joker’s more brilliant plans ( _the Rogues didn’t cotton to allowing an outsider villain nabbing their enemy—HA, HA—and had quickly foiled their plans with a two-way trip into the mirror world and then into Gotham Bay once the Scarlet Speedster was recovered_ ) and had ended both Harley and the Clown Prince in the hospital for three weeks with Joker laughing about the entire thing. As she recalled, Len Snart had said something about the Scottish Rogue not being in a very good mood; the brunette having bloodshot eyes and the shakes to prove it.  
  
Dr. Thompkins came back over to both girls, one large white bag of Harley’s marijuana pills in one hand, and in the other was a clear plastic baggie with a brownie the size of a small boat being waved in front of Harley’s face ( _awful; she considered it like she would a shoe being offered while shopping by a fetishist wishing to lick her toes after slipping it on_ ) in something like triumph.  
  
The former clown really wanted to break one of the skylights as Leslie smiled and questioned the two younger women, “Now then, where to lunch?”

* * *

 

“This is a bad idea.”  
  
“Eat the brownie, Harley.”  
  
“This is a really bad idea.”  
  
“Harley, the brownie will still taste like a brownie; now eat it.”  
  
“Shouldn’t the door be locked, at least?”  
  
Leslie had gone back to her clinic to deal with an emergency situation ( _Selina knew that this was a code developed for when she had to see Batman in a locked room under dim lighting for a bullet wound retrieval that Selina would have to keep an eye on when she went back to Wayne Manor after the day was done to be sure, as per Alfred’s and Leslie’s wishes, that Bruce didn’t pop the stitches and have to start taking blood through a tube_ ) and the brunette cat lover sat on Harley’s sofa with the hyenas on either side, annoyed, looking at her friend leaning against the wall with the fireplace. Harley was leafing through her erotica that were still in the early stages of being straightened up, gaze trying not to settle on the brownie on her coffee table, on her little blue plate with the magpies around the edges, a teacup of milk two inches to the right of the dessert.  
  
“You’re not doing anything wrong,” it was the third time Selina had said that, but it was really all she had this far into her trying to preserve her feelings of goodwill for the blue eyed blonde before simply tying her up with the whip hidden under her shirt around her waist and force-feeding the confection into her mouth, “You won’t get in trouble for this.”  
  
“But I don’t want to get into anything for this,” Harley whined, sagging against the wall and placing the papers under her glass question mark paperweight; a touch of her less mature self rising from the abyss she’d tried so hard to hide under a rock, “I don’t want it at all. Just think of what might happen.”  
  
“Like your being pain free?”  
  
“Like my dancing around singing some erroneous song I heard while holding an umbrella for a microphone,” she clarified, pacing her living room, “Or worse, one of the others finding out about this. I really, really, really don’t want to get a lecture from the people I am trying to remain on good terms with while I’m trying to treat them for their mental problems.”  
  
Selina made her hands form the symbol of ‘T’ for Time-Out, “Hold on, wait a minute, what makes you think they’ll even care? Most of them probably take worse than this, for fuck’s sake.”  
  
“They do not!”  
  
Selina flinched back an inch as Harley rounded on her, her left bare foot thumping the ground to illustrate her point more clearly as she went on, defensive, “None of them—aside from Bane, and let’s face it, it’s not like he has a choice with Venom; if he doesn’t take it, he’ll have a heart-attack from withdrawal and die—are taking or have taken any sort of drug that wasn’t a physician prescribed medication for a long time. Not even Croc, if you can believe that. They’ll yell at me forever when they find out I’m required by the Arkham staff as well as my own doctor to take _**Mary-Jane**_ if I am to remain a functioning member of work and society.”  
  
Selina, blue eyes squinted and looking far from understanding, didn’t appear to hear the last part of Harley’s little spiel. In fact, she made herself more comfortable in her seat ( _Bud kicked her hip to keep her on her own side as he didn’t really like her, but she ignored that_ ) and asked, “None of them take recreational drugs; are you serious?”  
  
Harley opened her mouth, but hesitated for a moment and spun on her heal before twiddling her pointer fingers, turning back again with her phalanges continued motion of circular rhythm, “Well, Jervis sometimes takes opium when he escapes and gets really, really, really depressed, but that’s mostly because he’s trying to self-medicate with something that isn’t beer. As you know, the only alcohol he likes in an expensive wine, and even then there has to be a professionally cooked meal to go with it.”  
  
She waved her hands around at that, her fingernails weaving patterns in the air like a lark’s wings before it takes off from the limb of an unstable green tree branch.  
  
“But even then, the last time Professor Crane found him like that; he dragged him to the first abandoned hotel he could find with running water and soaked him freezing from head to toe before yelling at him about the dangers of substance abuse. I do not want to go through that when they find out I’ve been prescribed marijuana.”  
  
Selina poked the plate below the brownie an inch forward on the coffee table. She did not much care for what Harley had to say about this ordeal, because she was due to see Bruce in two hours and she wanted to see the affects that might take place just in case Harley was very likely to jump from a window.  
  
“Eat the brownie.”

* * *

 

 _ **The Next Day, Arkham Asylum**_ …  
  
The pain in Harley’s abdomen, the stitches, the broken weavings of dried scabs and skin that would probably never heal, was all quietly simmering under her consciousness as she looked through the laundry basket full of discs and tapes she’d picked up that morning.  
  
She had eaten the brownie, and yet… nothing had happened. Selina had stayed the two hours before she’d had to leave, and Harley had spent three more just sitting in her living room waiting to see purple elephants drift over the ceilings like shifts of light; waited to get the urge to go and eat a four course meal fit for a family of seven; waited to feel dizzy. Rather, after the clock struck nine, she had simply made herself a light dinner and gone to bed.  
  
When she’s woken up, she’d called up Selina and left a message stating that she’d take the pills, the crap actually seemed not to make her want to kill herself—rather, the pain had diminished tremendously and could Miss Kitty be so good as to thank Dr. Thompkins for her?  
  
Harley yawned, taking out the first disc for the very first movie night so she could walk it to Leland’s office, stretch out her leg muscles and simultaneous freak everyone out by not insulting anyone.  
  
Not even the maintenance workers would be insulted for their lack of ability to fix the coffee machine.  
  
For the day, anyhow…

 


	23. Do You Like to Watch?

_-:-_  
I stand naked before you. Judge me, you bitch.  
-Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

* * *

 

  
The day after the first required movie night among patients was starting off rather awkwardly quiet; all the patients in a circle in group therapy was not unusual, but the way they were kind of just vaguely looking disturbingly at Crane was enough to get a reading of how they all had generally felt about his choice in a movie. The Professor himself looked unassumingly at the looks he was getting, and seemed simply pleased that his movie had somehow been picked first. Small victories.  
  
Joan coughed into her hand ( _shame that Harley couldn’t be a second doctor to help with this; still even the thought of group therapy left her in a state of panic that sent her into locking her office door_ ) and started up the conversation in the smoothest way she could think of, “So, **Feardotcom** , Professor Crane? What would make you pick a movie like that?”  
  
And when she said the smoothest way, she meant of course, to make her question seem as pathetically stupid as possible. Proceed with them thinking her a complete twit than not making an effort at all.  
  
“Yeah, Jon,” Eddie perked up after the doctor, one leg crossed over the other and fingers bridged in absolute glee, “Why something with such an awful plotline?”  
  
‘ _A great start_ ,’ Joan thought sarcastically and with the most abysmal amount of hope that she’d had at the start of any new treatment in group therapy.

* * *

 

“You know, I didn’t really think that your bad ideas could go any further downhill once you got through middle age, but as it always seems with you and the rest of the moron sheep herders here, I was wrong.”  
  
Dr. Arkham walked beside Dr. Quinzel as close as he dared ( _there was a thirteen inch gap and she appeared to be trying to hold down any attempt at moving ahead of him; this a good sign that she knew that even if she spoke with zero respect when with him that he still held the ax over her head to fire her if she rammed all of her luck off of a cliff_ ), feeling his upper left wisdom tooth grind enough to cause pain. His hands tightened along the rim of the clipboard he was often seen carrying in a somber attempt to divert any wills of his own to ring her neck as they made the way to her office from going over the last week’s notes he’d requested from her about Mr. Tetch’s sessions with her since breaking a teapot with her face (“ _Actually, it really wasn’t his fault; I pushed the wrong kind of button way too soon_ ”) in his own office.   
  
“It has to be done Dr. Quinzel,” Jeremiah stated, one hand coming up to the back of his head to brush some of his unruly hair out of the crease between his neck and his white coat, “It’s the asylum’s one-hundredth year of being a renowned establishment—“  
  
She snorted at such a remark ( _if renowned meant infamous in more ways than one dared to count, than okie-dokie_ ) but Dr. Arkham went on, ignoring the outburst.  
  
“And anything in the press that isn’t bashing us and causing funding to wane like the new moon is more than we can hope for. If the media want to interview some of my doctors, than I am going to let them. And if I chose you for a particular reporter than you are going to take the assignment.”  
  
Two years ago she used to laugh at how his voice got all sad when he was being serious and the “boss man” of the asylum, but as they walked through her open office door she simply contemplated how much she missed the days when no human being ( _civil servant or Rogue, good or bad, cop or vigilante, any of the doctors she was now working with again_ ) actually sought her out if they could possibly help it. She could understand why when she walked around in red, black and white people had seemed as if they didn’t want her within the range of a city block of their own person. Peace and quiet, as she had come to understand, was _**awesome**_.  
  
The blonde hopped onto her desk so she could stand really tall above Dr. Arkham as she asked ( _whined_ ) the question, “But why do I have to be interviewed? Is public relations so bad with Arkham that you have to set me out like a bunny rabbit at the dog track? Huh?”  
  
Jeremiah looked back down at his clipboard as Harley continued to stand tall on her desk and he had actually noticed that while she was indeed wearing her black coat like a pretty Grim Reaper, she was also wearing skin hugging black panty-hose and short-shorts made all the more impossibly revealing because she’s unbuttoned the damn coat back in his office ( _only doctor with working heat, for the moment, had its gifts and curses_ ) and his head was level to her upper thighs. Hard to believe Harley had never caused a sort of carnal attraction when she used to wear the mark of the jester and a doctor’s outfit got Dr. Arkham revved up.  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous. Dr. Blaylock and Wu are being interviewed by Summer Gleeson; Doctors Carlisle and Bartholomew are taking a long-distance phone call from the Daily Planet. And you and Dr. Leland get Jack Ryder. I’m not discriminate.”  
  
“Why can’t he just interview Joan?” Harley grumbled, jumping up once ( _Arkham averting his eyes as the coat drew up around her hips)_ before her legs did one of those impossibly obscene cheerleading moves and she landed her rump on the desk’s hardwood; her head going to be cupped in her hands.  
  
The older doctor blinked once, “He asked to interview you. Don’t ask me why,” he ordered, one hand coming up to halt her voice as she opened her mouth to spit out some kind of insult that would fit the situation, “I don’t know why. But you will be speaking with him like a doctor; because I say so.”  
  
Harley twisted her legs out from under her so that they stood behind her desk and her stomach lay flat to its top, chin still held in hand. She continued to freak out the older doctors ( _except Leland, somehow or another_ ) when she did those tricks that seemed to fit in with an act in Vegas of a French dialect and acclaim, but it was getting less shocking since she’d been prescribed medical Marijuana and started bringing erotica into work ( _Jeremiah himself had seen the prints once when she was out to lunch after a session with Riddler and had almost had a bout of heart failure_ ) to spook some of the patients into having a decent conversation with her. Little bits of hope to hold onto, it seemed, were pertinent.  
  
“…Fine. When is he coming in to do his own impression of a blood-sucking leech?”  
  
“On Friday of next week.”  
  
Her frown, while usually a joy to see because it meant that the person in the room that wasn’t her own self had gotten a hold of the situation, seemed a vague menace in this little exchange as she puckered her lips, swallowed her own spit and then spoke again, “Friday is my day off.”  
  
“Yes, but Leland works until the evening, which is why Mr. Ryder will be interviewing her here and then will be meeting you at the Iceberg Lounge.”  
  
Her blue eyes really were rather terrifying when they narrowed just so, “I beg your pardon?”  
  
Long spindly fingers ( _if deemed important, Harley would go so far as to say that they held remarkably similar characteristics as Professor Crane’s, though a little bit smoother and without deep cuts from many a grim experience in childhood_ ) reached into the left breast pocket of his white coat as Dr. Arkham searched and then retrieved for Harley’s eyes a white business card, a little dented and wrinkled, but otherwise unharmed. He set it onto the blonde’s desk and then turned back around to leave for a meeting with Bartholomew, anxious to escape the woman’s wrath.  
  
“He’s expecting you to call him in the next hour and a half to schedule, if you please.”  
  
Harley didn’t even get the chance to respond to that as the taller individual grabbed the metal handle to the door and swiftly slammed the thing shut.  
  
He waited about five seconds and felt remarkably smug when he heard something inside hit the wall and then shatter.

* * *

 

On her way back from the group therapy ( _oddly, a successful idea as it got every last one of the Rogues talking enough to pin-point some reason for their opinions; Jonathan had actually made her believe he had indeed been a wonderful teacher as he illustrated the crucial points of visual effects in the movie they had watched, his voice gaining a confidence that Leland often felt he faked when in private therapy with the other doctors. And his way of chatting most with Eddie and Jervis made her want to stand up and cheer with the realization that Harley hadn’t been lying when she’d told her that they often roomed together when they were on the run—establishing that they had compassion and feeling for the others beyond their own vendettas against the world_ ) Joan walked with a bit of a skip towards the lounge.  
  
She was going to get herself some nice coffee and then go straight to Dr. Arkham’s office to notify him of the development Harley’s idea had brought about! This was turning out to be a good day.  
  
Stepping through the doors to the lounge, Joan breezed by Dr. Carlisle and Bartholomew, talking with Kate and Becky ( _both back from their own scut work Harley had handed them, saying that if they cleared those then the two would be given exactly two sessions each with Jervis and Two-Face whenever the former D.A. got rounded up by the police or Batman_ ), but swiftly stopped skipping as the coffee machine’s door had been torn off and Harley was there in the room.  
  
It seemed that the former clown princess had decided that the time had come to snatch up three of the custodial workers and teach them how to properly clean and fix the coffee machine; her coat taken off and pleasantly folded atop one of the tables nearby, sleeves of her blue plaid shirt rolled up like some Kentucky stable hand, and foot tapping a mile a minute as she took a large wrench, slammed it inside the machine and five metal parts to a whole fell to the ground with ringing clangs and clatters. There was an almost (t _ender the word to resignation, because it was obviously a lie_ ) _**adorable**_ smudge of coffee claiming the skin of her cheek and forehead.  
  
Leland spun on the ball of her foot and made back out the way she came. She could get coffee after she spoke with Dr. Arkham, and preferably after Harley had made the workers cry and probably quit their jobs.

 


	24. Crimson Nitrogen

_-:-_  
I like your style. A little Bowie, a little Bardot. A look on your face that says:  
“I could kick the shit out of a truck driver.”  
-The Runaways.

 

* * *

  
  
An aria to a Russian play involving the scene of a young widower being disemboweled by his mistress should not be the type of music playing in the late-late hours of a club meant to be one of the hottest spots in town ( _the name on the door bringing on the impression of a chill in the air, notwithstanding)._ However, considering the owner and the fact that the rotund man paid no attention to the blonde in the farthest corner of the club’s dining area’s biting comments on décor as well as anything in the arts, one could suppose critics would have to deal with it until the clock struck twelve and the musician who was supposed to be there would arrive in a grand entrance of smoke and glitter ( _doubtlessly in an attempt to look like David Bowie, the poor bastard_ ).  
  
Harley suddenly wished ( _quietly, in the back of her head as she sipped at her half-consumed Creole Lady—light on the bourbon as this whole new experience was to be for work and she felt herself paying close attention to saying something that she might come to regret come morning_ ) that she smoked. It might have taken the edge off of waiting in the stupid Coffee Jelly colored dress and shawl Joan had foisted onto her during session when the other doctor herself was off to be interviewed by the reporter they’d both drawn the short stick for ( _“I’m not going to wear this; I’ll look like some fucking widow going out to cruise like a cougar for some young thing.” “Do you want him to hit on you?” “No.” “Then wear the damn dress and don’t ruin it.”)._ God knew that the people up in the private wings of the Iceberg Lounge seemed to enjoy it, despite that it left a cloud of smoke whenever someone opened the door to that particular parlor.  
  
The reporter was late, but she couldn’t vent about that, as he might have still been with Leland as Harley looked over to the far end of the room at the bar ( _tiny little TV bolted to the wall not too unlike the one the asylum held for patients; the visage of the ocean just north-east of Gotham riding the waves as some kind of disaster had been averted. Sinestro Corpsmen, Green Lanterns, Star Sapphires, Blue Lanterns, Red Lanterns littering the screen like Christmas confetti. If Harley squinted she could make out that annoyance Jordan with some teeny-bopper other Green and a Red Lantern that didn’t look older than her intern Toyman if he was a day; reporters from everywhere trying to catch a word from any of the lanterns at all_ ) and attempted to wave over Penguin’s girl Lark, whom was laughing at some poor joke by the man she was pouring seven hundred dollars worth of Russian wine for.   
  
The blonde would kill for pistachios.

* * *

 

He was going to die, slowly and painfully, once he got to that Iceberg Lounge ( _it was impossible to think anything else, even as his ankles were soaked in salt water and his car ran the risk of being stolen every minute he left it humming up on the hill_ ), but really, there was little he could do about it as he craned his neck looking for a lantern not already giving an interview to his rival reporters.  
  
Jack Ryder, freshly finished with talking with Joan Leland back at Arkham ( _a very straight and narrow woman, high honors at college, legitimate in her attempts to rehabilitate her patients; good enough even to offer Jack some advice when he went to see Dr. Quinzel_ ) had been pulled from his route to having dinner and what promised to be an interesting interview with Arkham’s most infamous doctor to get some quotes on what had been dubbed world-wide as a downed attempt at a Blackest Night. He couldn’t tell his boss no, however; too high a probability that all the greens and yellows, reds and blues, and the pink beings ( _if he was stoned there would be a perfect joke to crack about them all, though not to their collectively scary-ass faces, no sir_ ) would fly off back into space or wherever once they were done picking long dead bodies up from the coastline and the sea itself.  
  
He would get a quick quote and be back on his way. His shoes were ruined already, but it wasn’t like the Iceberg held a collection of people who would care about that ( _more likely to check his figure for a steel piece or knife, not his shoes for sand and water_ ) sort of thing.  
  
Eyes looking anywhere for some lantern close enough to get the attention of (preferably one not carrying a corpse covered in some black energy and such), Jack caught sight of a little female Green. One who looked much too young to be in what was a serenely quiet previous warzone, but that seemed to be the way things were in inter-galactic corps’. He could deal with that ( _stepping over a log that had floated in on the waves, up beside her figure with blues eyes looking at a pair of pink and yellow-orange starfish in the sand_ ).  
  
“Excuse me,” one of the most honest of reporters in Gotham greeted, gaining the ( _as it appeared,_ _ **mechanical**_ ) girl’s attention; her neck craning over to him in full awareness of his water soaked figure, “I am Jack Ryder of Gotham and I was wondering if you could answer some questions on behalf of your Green Lantern Corps for the people of Earth? It will be quick, I promise.”  
  
Quiet, almost like a child, the little robot ( _she was a robot, Jack could tell, and he was well and wondering if she would even be within her perimeters to answer_ ) nodded once and looked him in a most intimidating fashion directly in the eyes, “Hello. I am the NAVCOM Aya of the Green Lantern Corps, how may I be of assistance Mr. Ryder?”  
  
Jack almost gave a little hop as he smiled gently at her politeness ( _a satisfying thing that reporters in Gotham didn’t really get, if at all_ ) and took out his little pocket sized recorder, pressing the ‘on’ switch with his thumb ( _a crack in his skin causing a minor discomfort he didn’t really even feel anymore_ ).

* * *

 

The deep blue of the pool at the center of the club sometimes showed blue when Harley squinted her eyes and the little seals Ozzie kept for show purpose splashed in, creating almost lunar effects at the bottom of the pool itself ( _little bits and bobs of debris at the bottom; a piece of a fish’s tail the seals hadn’t swallowed because a sharp tooth tore it the wrong way, three light yellow bird feathers Harley could guess were from when Ozzie stayed the night to do more business and let the canaries flit around, a cheap sequin that was teal and bunched in with decorative rock as if it was put there on purpose_ ) before they turned and her eyes readjusted to their figures.  
  
Wandering from her seat was perhaps not the brightest thing to do when there was still a chance that Mr. Ryder would show up in another hour before she got fed up and left ( _he could comp. for the meal of mushrooms with garlic and butter as a side to a BLT sandwich she was still waiting on; she didn’t care how rude it was to send the bill to his TV station if she had to_ ), but waiting on her butt was never something she liked to do. In recent days she found that pins and needles from numbness when her legs fell asleep developed too quickly for her liking in situations like that ( _part of the recent why in therapy she often moved with ease from her chair to her desk to her window with perfect ease_ ).  
  
“Oh, Arkham, you are so going to be the bone I pick at when I get back to work…” she muttered to herself over the music (“… _My heart is overflowing….There’s so much you could come to love_ …”) in reference to Dr. Arkham staging this ridiculousness.  
  
From across the way, her blue eyes ( _not like the water in the pool, because that would mean she was like an old-timey movie star and she didn’t like being equated with the likes of Bette Davis or, God forbid, Audrey Hepburn_ ) caught commotion and she turned to find the man of the hour (t _hree really; and yes, he was THAT late_ ) stumbling over his own two, sopping wet, feet to get to the table he had arranged for the both of them ( _much to Ozzie’s laughing amusement that would put Harley’s babies to shame_ ). He seemed almost crestfallen when he saw she wasn’t there and she was tempted to leave him like that… but then, she’d have to do this whole thing over again and really, she’d prefer to not do that.  
  
Stepping back from the side of the pool, she didn’t bother to be disgusted at how he lit up at her for both still being in the Lounge and for seeming to find her attractive in Joan’s tacky-sap clothing.  
  
She folded her arms when she took her seat and he shut up before he interrupted her saying, “Well, I assume you have a good reason for being so late.”  
  
Jack coughed into his open palm ( _same arm that he carried his watch, little bits of sand falling from the band against his skin and onto the table that he didn’t even notice_ ) and took his seat; his shoes making a little slopping noise in doing so.  
  
“Yeah, sorry about that. I had to get a quote or two from some of those Lanterns up the coast or my boss would have had my ass in a sling.”  
  
( _Somewhere along the seaside where Mr. Ryder had just come from; covered in water from slipping on the moss of a large rock jutting out of the ocean, a Red Lantern sneezed. At his side, the Green Lantern lady-robot Jack had gotten his very long, very detailed quotes from requested if the other was feeling well, as there was a large multitude of illnesses that Earth had, and did not wish for him to come down with any of the ones that she had been informed could be easily contracted just by accidentally swallowing sea water_.)  
  
The doctor that was to be interviewed yawned, but looked like she believed him, “Fine. I already ordered for the both of us,” ( _and she had for him; a steak ordered to be extra well done and a water he could choke it down with_ ) “So just get on with it so I can eat and leave.”  
  
The brunette male lifted an eyebrow at finally noticing how her speech patterns were as different as Dr. Leland said they were. It almost made her seem to be like a real human being with moral standing and not a trace of clowning-around anywhere. But, he digressed otherwise Creeper would rear his ugly head and force Jack ( _such the Hyde to his Jekyll, even if he was a bit too odd even for Stevenson to write, and far from as bloodthirsty as the dark figure of literature unless it was forced on the Joker)_ to ask the woman out. Which he would not be doing, at all, ever, ever, ever.  
  
Nodding at her rather bored facade ( _identified by him as the look a hare would give a rabbit before it either would move on or continued eating, ignoring the rabbit entirely_ ), Jack switched out the tape from his recorder filled with the questions and answers from back at the beach, to a clean tape. He pressed the ‘On’ button and made himself pull out the little notepad of questions he had scribbled down earlier that week. Most of the questions were marked off from his interview with Leland, but the ones left for Harley wouldn’t leave much for this interview, thus leading to the probability of him repeating some of the crossed off questions unto the blonde.  
  
{“ _ **Yeah, and what she has to say will probably be a lot more interesting; am I right, my man?”}**_  
  
Jack flinched internally; the only external sign that he’d heard the manifestation of being thrown into a vat of acidic chemicals while laughing by force showing in his shoulders tensing and his arm muscles becoming strained against the little cotton patch Batman had given him the week before when he’d run out and Creeper had decided to help the Justice League save same alien race that looked quite a bit like the yellow skinned loony ( _both Jack and Batman angry at how that had gone, despite Creeper being a surprising help_ ).  
  
“Okay, so, first and kinda obviously question: What’s it like to work at Arkham Asylum?”  
  
“Sucks.”  
  
The woman hadn’t even blinked or taken five seconds to think about the answer.  
  
Their meals arrived at that moment ( _carted in by Raven in her less than modest garb Penguin required all three of his girls to wear, the dark girl herself looking like she was highly amused by the sight of the two people at the same table; no doubt she, like her boss, knew about the incident of Joker tossing the reporter into a vat of chemicals while Harley had been laughing in the wings_ ), providing Jack a distraction from Creeper cackling at the blunt tone the blonde now held.  
  
{“ _ **Oh, foxy lady! The old girl still has a dance or two left!”}**_  
  
Jack lifted his glass of **water** to nobody in particular, eyes rolling around as he said, rather dry and almost sarcastic, “To better times.”  
  
( _Hopefully those better times would be soon as Harley neither raised her glass to concur, nor acknowledge that the man had even said anything as she popped one of her mushrooms into her pert little mouth_.)  
  
His wet shoes and socks seemed more comfortable, somehow.

 


	25. Fresh Meat From a Locker

_-:-_  
Look at this movie and tell me this director shouldn’t have a date with Hannibal Lecter.  
-Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2004.

 

* * *

  
  
It is a rare thing, Bruce realized ( _walking out of a fresh morning bakery with Alfred, helping his butler/pseudo-father pick up what was to be served for dinner that evening and then desert later; large French rolls with glaze to make them sweet, honey bread, a small clutch of muffins in chocolate with fine powders on top_ ) quietly, to find the life a woman leads when she doesn’t think she’s being watched.  
  
Selina would disapprove if she found out ( _Bruce already knew that Alfred did disapprove, indeed, as his employer left the food they had gathered with the older man and said he might run late getting back to the Manor_ ) that her boyfriend was doing such things as stalking her friends without the cat lover’s knowledge; but how often was it to go to the market place ( _bodegas and stalls at their best, attendants trying their finest to sell their goods to the public, large refrigerated buildings like the foundation of the whole place every block or so_ ) and find a pair of hyenas walking around the meat market without a leash, their mistress nearby all in black and looking quite tired?  
  
He hadn’t seen her much since their last lunch a month and a half ago with her smelling rather suspiciously of activities of the carnal nature. He had been busy not only in his work with Wayne enterprises, but as Batman ( _all the way over in India trying to work out a way to bring in child smugglers as well as the diamond smugglers that were helping the wretched child molesters through threatening nearby villagers with burnings down their homes in mass amounts, fire power to back it all up leaving the detective exhausted for weeks even with Dick and Tim’s help_ ) as well and he feared he had been rather negligent with both the men and women in his life.  
  
Following like a shade, Bruce maneuvered the vegetable stalls as Harley walked into one of the much older refrigerated buildings (“ _Fresh Meats” painted on the side of the building in cannonball blue and in a font not so different from Haley’s Circus_ ) with Bud and Lou causing some of the workers to stop and stare for a moment. Most of the workers went back to work immediately after taking a gander at the large spotted beasts before shrugging as if they had seen them before (‘ _Knowing Harley,’ Bruce considered, one side of his mouth twitching up a millimeter, ‘They probably have_.’), while the occasional other set of employees, still hauling the dead bodies of cattle, sheep and pigs from trucks in the back, gave a longer glance at Harley herself. She wasn’t wearing anything too beautiful ( _he has the vague thought that it had been an awful long time since she’d worn anything pastel, rather than everything in blacks, browns and dark blues that made her seem to come out from the canvas of Picasso in his Blue Period_ ), but she still had a rather shapely figure and a face that was pretty ( _not beautiful, not anymore, sad as it all was since everyone started knocking her around)_ if anyone paid enough attention.  
  
Swerving his body so he stood in the shadow of one of the large hauling trucks ( _it smelled of ice crystals and old work horses, but his eyes did not deceive him as workers carried from the confines one at a time the bodies of brown whole body and brown/white spotted cows; their dead legs tied properly so they could hang by front or back, no hesitation needed either way_ ), Bruce’s blue eyes traced over to the figure Harley seemed to be chatting up, Bud and Lou at her side and sniffing at already hanging forms of some sturdy looking bulls with the horns cut off to protect the workers from injury. The hyenas seemed positively magnesium from the sights and smells ( _true to form, with their training, however, they did not dare lick or touch a single beef carcass_ ).  
  
The figure of the man over in the shadows was young and handsome, Latino, and familiar in a way that Bruce couldn’t quite place. He wore simple black pants and a brown leather jacket to keep himself insulated against the cold he doubtlessly had to endure every other day ( _if the calluses along his hands where his fingerless gloves showed his skin was anything to go by_ ), and gave Harley a little wave over to three very large bull carcasses hung up, obviously to be looked over by the psychologist herself. He didn’t smile in greeting, but Bruce could read his lips and could tell from his speech patterns and the way Harley didn’t glare at his young face that he was at least polite.  
  
Squinting, Bruce read the young man’s lips, “So, what will it be today? The large brown from Wisconsin? This white boy here was brought in from the west of Jersey; has great bone structure,” he stated, pitching for a dark brown steer that looked like it could feed a lion, over to an albino with its red-pink eyes lolled down to the floor; lastly all the way over to a black and white spotted one that could have been a dairy cow in a past life, but turned into a male in its current, “But I really hope you choose this sucker here from Rhode Island.”  
  
“Oh, I can see why,” the Dark Knight observed Harley’s lips move, cynical as always, “This would cost me at least two-hundred, deary.”  
  
The young man shrugged, giving her a somewhat flirtatious smile that caused Bruce to tense in his shadow and Harley to roll her eyes, bending around the cow, small hands ( _left hand covered in white gauze from a burn still healing on account of three days previous having to run through the back of the Iceberg Lounge to avoid Two-Face when he’d gone to see Ozzie; a skillet full of boiling grease dropped by a surprised cook; a simple accident_ ) touching the cow’s ribs and haunches.  
  
“I could sell it to you for one-fifty,” the other offered as Harley took a large knife of her own out of the side pocket of her black coat (grooved slightly at the end, a pitch black leather grip, very old), bringing up to the level of her shoulder before driving it precisely ( _almost as if that was her preferred technique of fighting; offense instead of defense_ ) into the far left side of the animal’s chest. Precisely where the creature’s heart made an ice-crystal similar crack; the young man taking a little step back because even if the woman was reformed she was a formidable force to be reckoned with.  
  
The knife didn’t get in very far, but that actually caused Harley to smile and thoroughly disturb both the seller of the merchandise and Bruce from far away.  
  
“…You are one of our better customers, after all.”

* * *

 

Kate’s hands were bigger than Joan’s, Becky’s, Hiro’s and Harley’s; so they made quite a show to look at when she assisted Hiro in removing the lid from the jar kept in the top shelf in the cupboards filled with gingersnaps. She stole one for herself before handing it back to the young man ( _his head bowed down in mild shame for the blow to his masculinity_ ).  
  
“So, where was I?” Kate questioned, finding her mind a blank space as she looked back to Becky ( _the freckled woman sipping the tea Joan had snatched from Harley’s office to put into the lounge coffee pot when they all found that at the same time that the vending coffee was broken, the normal coffee pot in the corner was out of grounds; it was the tea leaves Harley had taken up to keep Jervis happy and though Becky thought it was as good as water from a duck pond, it at least had caffeine_ ), face turning down as she sipped her drink in disgust of the liquid.  
  
“You couldn’t believe Ivy picked Fargo for movie night just to point out the only redeeming quality in a chosen few men,” Becky supplied, accepting a gingersnap from Hiro before he took his leave of the both of them to go and speak with Bartholomew on a report he’d given the older doctor ( _Hiro suspecting that, perhaps, the language was as over Bartholomew’s head as Harley said it would be when she’d told the young man to use smaller words_ ).  
  
Kate snapped her fingers and nodded happily, “Right, thank you! Anyway, I was thinking that when all was said and done she would tell the group that the reason she picked the thing was because of the macabre transition from comedy to horror in a blink-“  
  
“Yeah,” Becky nodded, “That movie is pretty darn creepy unless you’re a sociopath or something.”  
  
“But it turns out that Miss Isley is a closet romantic. Even after Crane pointed out how the subject matter was excellent to point out reasons not to get married-“  
  
“Gambling husband to a woman with a rich father, equals the perfect recipe for tragedy.”  
  
“Ivy went in and said that she watched the movie because it offers up one ray of hope among the male actors who are everything from kidnappers, killers, idiot police, desperate gamblers, hot-headed ass-hole business men. That ray of hope being the artist married to the pregnant chief of police.”  
  
“That is kinda weird that she thinks that guy was a the one ray of hope in the entire plot,” Becky said, roving her eyes around the confines of her drink before setting it back on the table, ignoring how the heat was actively leaving it and it would be worthless soon; fine by her as it was not worth the effort to drink it anymore.  
  
Kate nodded, but continued, really getting into her explanation, “I know, but then Nigma said the same thing you did, but with that obnoxious air of superiority and then she made her point so clear it was like everyone else in the room was stupid for not seeing it. She says that if a guy like that happily bends to the will of a woman half his size and makes her breakfast before she leaves for work so she’ll be healthy before she’s off to see what must be a horrible crime, then he must be a good guy. But if he also, without asking, brings her Arby’s food to work for no reason other than to see her and make sure she’s happy, that makes him the absolute love of her life.”  
  
“She kinda over-simplified,” Becky stated, seeming a little dubious.  
  
“Yeah, but she kinda also had a fair point. I mean, it kinda gives false hope, but Ivy seemed so sure of herself.”  
  
“Sure of herself in what way?”  
  
Kate stood from her seat, looking at the clock on the wall, “Oh, shit, I’m gonna be late for that joint therapy with Dr. Wu. Can we finish this later?”  
  
Becky held up her hands in a ‘you’ve-got-to-be-kidding’ way, “Finish what? What was the point you were trying to make?”  
  
The redhead with the vampire countenance gave Becky a look ( _subtle and almost mean; like a farmer gives a chicken after it gets its head stuck in a fence_ ) and stated, “That Poison Ivy still holds that little part of herself that allows for romantic thoughts. Which means she’s not a hopeless case. Duh.”  
  
She picked up her whitecoat she’d hung over the back of her seat and swiftly left at the end of that statement; the door to the lounge giving a little swish to blot out the sounds of her heals clicking against the floor.  
  
When the door clicked fully closed, Becky felt a little light bulb light up in her head, “…Oh, I get it. Something to give Dr. Qunizel the next time we get a pop quiz on why the Rogues aren’t a hopeless cause. Got it.”  
  
Speaking to herself was not, however, really a good thing while on Arkham grounds and lead to Becky snapping out of her ditziness to pick up her cane and leave for Leland’s office before the lunch hour was over.  
  
She forgot her cup of ice cold tea on the table and would doubtlessly get yelled at for it later.

* * *

 

…The cow carcass, wrapped in sheets of plastic and finally sitting in the trunk of Harley’s car ( _Bruce was a little surprised to find that the garage similar doors opened to a back parking lot where Harley’s car sat waiting for loading, trunk open wide like the maw of an animal ready to be fed, the exhaust from the car spewing grey mist from its pipe into the chilly air_ ), left only one thing left for the psych doctor and the seller to do. Pay the man and make meaningless pleasantries.  
  
The knife Harley had used on the cow was tucked back into her pocket and Bruce made a mental note to figure out why exactly it looked as if she might very well carry it around everywhere she went ( _some-thing he, needlessly to say, disapproved of_ ).  
  
“So, Benny,” Harley intoned quietly, but loud enough for Bruce to hear as the Wayne had moved to the outside so he was standing in the shadows of the back lot, near the bodegas and other people, rather than inside among dead meat on hooks, “How is your sister doing these days?”  
  
Bruce had only to glance, barely, at the man to find that the question might have not been the most pleasant; Harley sliding money into his gloved hands as they tried, maybe, not to clench around her fingers and tighten.  
  
“Renee’s fine,” the young man, Benny, replied with a little acid as he put the money into the inner pocket of his coat, “Not that you actually care about cops or even about my family business.”  
  
Harley shrugged, smiling with teeth as she jumped from the back loading dock and onto the ground, hands in her pocket, “You’re right, I don’t. I’m just curious if she’s found out I’m one of your buyers.”  
  
“No, she hasn’t.”  
  
Bruce had to draw back more sharply from his hiding place as Harley got into her car and almost looked his way ( _it took a moment, however, as he finally realized why the young man was familiar_ ).  
  
Jumping into her seat, the hyenas happy to have her in the car and to be leaving for home, Harley gave Benny a bit of a nod before her keys turned in the ignition and she started backing out onto a side street, “That’s good, I suppose. You two fight enough as it is without adding little old me into the mix.”  
  
“Whatever,” he replied, moving back into his work place, pressing a button to allow the mechanized door to close.  
  
Harley’s car swept by Bruce’s hiding spot and the older man was allowed a small glance of Harley leaving her more delinquent smile behind for a kind of look that screamed guilt ( _for something so small, Bruce wondered why she bothered_ ).  
  
He watched her car round a corner and disappear from the market; after which he removed himself from his shadow and moved back into the busy hustle and bustle to find Alfred.  
  
Was it odd for him to wonder why exactly Harley would be buying such an amount of meat from the work place of detective Montoya’s brother, rather than any of the other meat lockers around Gotham? It probably meant nothing, but he would doubtlessly keep a hold on the information in the event ( _unlikely, but with his life, who knew_ ) that something questioning happened.  
  
For the time being, he had to get back to the car before Alfred left or he would be forced to either get a taxi during rush-hour, or walk.

 


	26. Egyptian Cotton

_-:-_  
After one page I was yearning for the worldly cynicism of Barney the Dinosaur.  
-Frasier.

 

* * *

  
  
“Okay, you will _all_ wipe your feet or you can stand there sopping wet.”  
  
The personifications of Rock-Paper-Scissors ( _they may well have been what sparked such a sensation of playing the game in space, it could be bet_ ) gave the woman an odd look, but easily did as asked; three pairs of feet pressing back and forth on the welcome mat ( _Selina made her get rid of the one she’d had that said ‘Go Away’_ ) to rid themselves of the remaining water drops retained by the energy from their rings covering them as well as some mud from the gutter when they’d stepped onto the street to ask for the psyche doctor to buzz them in, before Harley moved out of the way and three different Lanterns entered her abode for the second time in as many weeks. She had to resist rolling her eyes at the first two, but was pleasant enough when she closed the door behind the last ( _she tried not to notice how he seemed to smile at finding that there was no hanging dead animal in the center of her living area, just her coffee table with papers neatly spread out to be put into separate folders and a small box with a red plus sign to signify medication and healing—the perfectionist in him never one to be out of sight for very long_ ).  
  
“So, what can I help you all with this time?”  
  
Really, she was glad for the distraction from using the med-kit on the still healing ( _thirteen different kinds of wire and sort of thread, needles innumerable; the flesh peeling red-black-brown from the blood that dried and scattered and dripped_ ) lacerations along the length of her left arm. She didn’t like the chances of getting blood on all of her dead neighbor’s drawings.  
  
Holding in her disdain when Hal Jordan glanced at her ( _pity--not understanding--should have listened to Carol_ ) was something she would have to remember the next time she went out to the gym.

* * *

 

 **{Two Days Previous** …}  
  
“ _You’re given me a hand-made crossword puzzle?”_  
  
(Twenty-one Down: Why Should a Hook Fear a Pan? Fifteen Across: Columbine Forgets Not? Seven Down: A Hatter is Born in the Month of?)   
  
She looks like a bored cat, stomach lithe across the top of her gutted chair, arms dangling with the little white card Joan had given her earlier in a fair warning of whom Jeremiah was seeing in his office later during lunch (Arthur Reeves, the poor City Councilman that Two-Face detested and Joker, on occasion, liked to poke fun at when he was feeling bored; a favorite pass-time of the clown’s was to use the phones all patients were allowed to use, so long as they were recorded, once a month to call up the jerk at his office and send him into a relapse by telling a bad joke and lapsing into roaring, wicked laughter). Harley didn’t seemed at all concerned with the suspicion in Eddie’s tone; the large sheet of black and white she’d brought out still on the table next to the cup of plain green tea (honey in the bottom of the teacup and the lasted traces of the one sugar cube straining along the bottom before they vanished as well) she’d made him with not a trace of Jervis having recommended it.  
  
“Uh-huh.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because you guys wanted to know why I didn’t tell you I was leaving Joker.”  
  
“And the answers are in here?” It was different, certainly, but he seemed to be interested as he peered over the edge of the table and looked more carefully at the thing, eyes narrowed down at the way of her handwriting that was intelligent enough to decipher but difficult to understand. The riddles were beautifully written, all quiet text and yet—he figured out only two on first glance (Three Down: The Only Tree Ivy Kills Happily. Answer: Woodrow. Six Across: The Only Virtue The Judge Won’t Ignore. Answer: Grace) and figured that it would take him a delightfully long time to figure out all the rest. It was like finding that donkey from the Brothers Grimm that spat gold.  
  
“You can’t really lie, what’s the point of my doing so here?”

* * *

 

Sinestro stepped over towards the doorway of her kitchen, smelling the pizza with the yellow cheese stuffed crust inside the oven, cooking and spreading vapor of a lovely smell to cover the associations to pain being covered up that came with the peroxide and alcohol she had to use in this place he had only been in once. She hadn’t noticed that he had a thin box in green coloring hidden between his arm and torso ( _long enough for one of those gift packages for those strangely extraordinarily expensive ties executives give one another during Christmas_ ).  
  
“Carol alerted me to just how expensive the sheets you gave me for bandages were and would not stop pestering me to return here before leaving the planet and give the re-sewn remains back to you.”  
  
In this statement, he held up the package and ignored the look Carol Ferris gave him, but seemed to raise high a hidden curiosity when Harley tilted her head and looked confused. Hal Jordan tried to pick up one of the books from the shelf to look over and relieve his boredom of the situation, but Bud started him by pressing his wet nose to the Green Lantern’s left knee, tail erect ( _Lou seemed equally inquisitive of the human himself, but was occupied with Carol lightly patting his head; kneading her fingers into the outlines of the spots below the shell of his ear_ ).  
  
“All of my sheets come from either the discount bin or whatever I can scrounge up at any of my old hideouts that haven’t collected dust and mildew,” Harley stated, turning her head towards Carol with a snide smile shaping into a somewhat condescending sneer, similar to something Ivy would give one of her victims ( _or Carlisle before he fell for her like that pathetic sap he was/is_ ), “Carol, honey, what exactly did you think those sheets were worth?”  
  
It looked like Carol was going to have a little tizzy, but instead, like the sane person she was ( _now that her Sapphire gem had been given a little readjustment by Hal and Queen Aga’Po before the whole war of light; causing her to be happily more aware of what the hell she was doing_ ), the brunette lady used her own ring energy to grab the box Sinestro held, open it up ( _actually flinging the lid over her shoulder so that it hit Harley’s favorite of the erotic art that was framed; a romanticized/fantasy version of ‘_ _ **Girl With the Pearl Earring’**_ _spliced with ‘_ _ **The Pale Complexion of True Love’**_ _; it nearly crashed to the floorboards but saved itself on its pin at the last second_ ) and pulled out the sheets Harley had given Sinestro.  
  
Indeed, the sheets were stitched back together and no longer held any sign that they had been used to keep Sinestro from losing more blood than needed, but other than that, they seemed rather unremarkable. But, Harley allowed Carol to come to her point; she found the tag of the sheets and held it straight up to Harley’s face.  
  
“Twelve-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton,” Carol stated, fingernails tracing the words on the tag that were just as smooth as the sheets themselves and almost made her toes curl inside of her uniform’s custom boots, “Is this ringing any bells?”  
  
Blue eyes, wide and a little stupid to be drawn to the tag, raised the sheets higher and took a moment or two to respond.  
  
“…Oh, yeah.”  
  
( _The ‘yeah’ was dragged out to emphasize her astounding realization that the sheets indeed belonged to her and, heh, they were indeed, quite pricey as Carol brought to her attention_.)

* * *

 

 **{Three Days Previous** …}  
  
“ _Do you really think this will work?”  
  
“It’ll work. Or, at least it will work better than the way you’re pulling off that leather jacket. Vintage swag from your mommy, Joan?”  
  
Above their heads in the café Joan found the both of them frequenting more often (_ _ **at Joan’s request, at Harley’s request, it didn’t matter; rather it was a good thing that neither of them cared to acknowledge beyond talking, paying the tab and then Joan constantly trying to get away before Harley dragged her to the gym around the corner to try and “toughen” Dr. Leland up, preaching about all the times in previous years where a little training would have saved the elder some physical grief**_ _), a train passed on the L, thirteen black crows made for the river to the south to bathe in Gotham river where very few other birds dwelled, two white winged moths killed themselves by slamming into a bug zapper. At the table, Joan tightened her hold on the paper Harley had called her to the café to look over; her thumbnails digging into one white square and one black square.  
  
Joan really wished that Harley could go a day without insulting her clothes, but didn’t say anything on it. She grinned and bore the scorn; seasoned years as a doctor in Arkham giving her far more patience than she sometimes liked.  
  
The darker skinned woman set her coffee cup on the table and brought a hand up to the lapel of her brown leather jacket with the fuzzy fur lining (_ _ **white-grey, formerly of the body of a mountain goat that her father had shot, killed, gutted, gave to Joan’s mother for dinner as an anniversary gift in memoriam of their few trips to the Alps, and then fit the fur into the leather jacket that he’d given her when they were lovebirds in high school**_ _), pinching it as she stated, not exactly defensive, but with enough force to get Harley’s face to readjust from scrutiny of the jacket into a kind of vague amusement._  
  
“Professional tailoring from daddy, actually. And I make it look good.”  
  
The blonde snorted into her cup, choking a little on the liquid in an instant of spontaneous amusement that she never before would have thought Joan to be capable of. It was nice.

* * *

 

The Star Sapphire held both her hands up in exasperation.  
  
“What, you didn’t know that you had such expensive sheets lying around to be used as Band-Aids when alien jerks come to your house like injured pets?”  
  
“Excuse me,” Sinestro interrupted, glaring at Carol with an indignant air all around him; insulted to be compared to the only two animals that he knew to be Harley’s pets ( _not that they weren’t pleasant to him or most people that the blonde used to know, but they reminded him too often of Karu-Sil’s Fathers Three which was not a point in favor for the hyenas_ ).  
  
“Sorry, but come on!” Carol responded back, not sorry in the least.  
  
Harley shrugged her petite shoulders ( _made seemingly even more tiny by the fact she was only wearing a black spaghetti strap, extra-large tank-top and brown jogging shorts, topped off with her hair in a messily braided bun; giving her all the physical epitome of some well paid Olympic gym instructor_ ) and refolded the sheets from the mess Carol had made out of them trying to find the tag. She appeared to not mind at all that she had indeed used the extremely soft material, imported material as something to help out Sinestro when he had been injured and hiding from the two humans in the room as well. Rather, she seemed pleased to offer the service and was made all the more pleased that she hadn’t been aware of it.  
  
“And you made him come all the way to Gotham to give the sheets back to me?” Harley hummed, sheets folded perfectly and then haphazardly tossed onto the couch where she had been sitting as she made for the kitchen to browse around the guts of her fridge ( _she did or didn’t notice how Sinestro arched his brows towards Lou when he automatically perched onto the couch and set his head on the fabric, taking in the smells of whatever cleaning product they’d used, whatever the Green, Sapphire and Yellow energy left behind, and some residue of Sinestro’s blood in the fibers_ ). The chill enveloped her somewhat opened wounds when the door opened, but while both Hal and Carol seemed to flinch at how the chill morphed into white mist and touched down on torn and bleeding skin, Sinestro just seemed to be fixed on how the lightbulb in the back of the fridge was burned out and there was precious little in the cold box other than some canned and bottled drinks, freshly carved meat and an entirely full bag of what Hal had introduced to Sinestro as corndogs.  
  
“I suppose I should be grateful,” Harley stated, pulling out a soda, cranking on the top, some fizzy pouring out and onto the floor in five droplets, “It’s one of the few things I have left from celebrating my college graduation.”

 


	27. Tube of Lipstick

_-:-_  
We’re talking about the world’s oldest profession… Granted this is sort of the Walt Disney version, but still.  
-Frasier.

 

* * *

  
  
There were occurrences that seemed to be piling up in the back of Joan Leland’s subconscious. A bit of an accumulation of questions that needed answering that, though important, she would not bother with. If the thoughts were paper in an attic she could imagine taking them all out to the hibachi hut on her apartment balcony ( _gift from her parents one year during Christmas when Joan had thought she might be meeting someone for the first time after being in an internet relationship for over a year; the relationship tanking before meeting face to face, but the hibachi hut great for winter to roast marshmallows and for summer to make barbeque_ ), douse them liberally in ether and then light a match to watch them catch flame and smolder into oblivion.  
  
She found herself unable to do so with thoughts in her head, so she had found herself one day ( _first day off of the week, splendid and not as cold as it usually was in winter_ ) picking up a little notebook from the convenience store she bought her fruit from and then started writing things down randomly every night before she went to bed ( _after, of course, brushing her teeth and getting into her pajamas; it felt wrong to her if she was tired and her mouth felt like her teeth and the skin of her gums were growing the reeds shown often on National Geographic when they were doing documentaries on marine life_ ) with a steady hand; pausing only if a cramp overtook her wrist.  
  
Joan sat in bed with one of the pens she’d bought during her years in college that still worked, purple ink blemishing the paper as she scribbled things down that were bothering her more than usual and had simply come to a head recently in the week after incidents in and out of Arkham Asylum. A pile-up and disturbance that, though not easily solved, could be put away if she simply got them out of her head.  
  
[ _Harley seems to be taking an interest in the interns that we (the institute, the doctors,) hadn’t anticipated. Her derogatory comments about Ms. Albright have dimmed to only a few a week; she’s not being as terrifying towards Hiro whenever he makes a mistake; she drove Ms. Kane back to the city when the young lady’s car broke down and Kate didn’t come back the next day entirely unpleasant towards Harley. Though…I’ve noted that some of Harley’s behavior towards the patients has taken a bit of an odd turn. Seems that Arnold is worried about her and his Scarface persona has taken to using these instances of humanity to tease the man even more_ …]

* * *

 

The dummy’s prison garb was clean and pressed, which should not have been possible. That was all that really came to Joan’s mind as the Ventriloquist was brought into her office by the guards, the motion of the door opening and closing leading the incense burning inside of the turnips and radishes she’d found on her desk that morning ( _Halloween fast approaching as it always did with her intention to buy some little soccer ball sized pumpkins, never able to; these historically accurate vegetables having little faces cut into them with ambiguous visage of neither horror nor happiness_ ) to sway the smoke wafting out of them into suicidal curves and puffs. She was a little nervous at not taking notes for the session as Harley had suggested (“ _If you take notes, Scarface will ignore you, insult you or make some comments about your tits; Arnie will just be less talkative_ ”), but she was hopeful as she sat in her own seat.  
  
“So, Arnold,” Joan started, fingers that were not used to not holding a pencil during these sessions at present fiddling with the end of her red/black plaid button-sweater sleeve ( _thin for the season, but comfortable to her person; made her feel like a northern born Daisy Duke_ ), loose string at the end aligning with the inside of her thumbnail, “I was informed yesterday by Dr. Blaylock that some mail came in for you from a Mister Rhino. You were very quiet at lunch. Is there any possibility that you’d like to talk about it?”  
  
The Ventriloquist stayed quiet in his seat, but he wasn’t looking at her face and neither was his “boss” ( _there wasn’t his usual timidity that usually came from her asking about him; he wasn’t sweating and wasn’t pale, which was a nice change that she had been waiting for since he’d come back from his last stint of relapse from reform_ ).  
  
She opened her mouth to ask another question, but was soon interrupted by the dummy blinking over at her and then giving what, for wood and mechanisms, could pass as a lecherous smile before crossing one leg over the other and (much to Joan’s chagrin) opening his mouth, “Where’d that there picture come from, Doc?” He nodded over to her wall with the California ceiling shelves that served as the holders for her paperwork, her books and—on very rare occasions—her art.  
  
Joan blinked at the puppet and, nervous against her better internal instructions, turned her head to glance at the picture Harley had given her a few days ago ( _tacked it to the wall herself, actually; nevermind that Joan didn’t even like the kind of art that the blonde did with rough lines and a lot of skin showing on the figures within the white or ivory drafting paper in odd colored ink_ ) that was about six-by-six inches and showcased an attempt to copy Klimt’s _**Hope II**_ ( _a woman of sallow continence with light skin and a belly full of seven-months-along infant trying to show through, rouge cheeks like mirrors to the breasts full of milk half-covered by the pregnant woman’s own ebony windowpane hair; all beautiful_ ). It was a little inappropriate to tack to an asylum’s office wall, but Joan ( _she had yelled at Harley, with the other laughing a while yet, “Oh, come on! That is the least pornographic thing I’ve found in those two trash bags yet—be honored for the dead”_ ) had been grateful for it over the last couple days with having to treat Ivy and Jervis who had glanced at the thing and been, seemingly, more open than usual.  
  
Bartholomew, Arkham, Wu and even Carlisle had advised her against conversing with Scarface ( _never ever do it—just say no_ ) and for the longest time Joan could understand why, but…  
  
(“ _But he’s not a real person.”  
  
“Of course he is, otherwise you wouldn’t call a slab of wood a ‘him’ and Arnold wouldn’t need him.”  
  
Joan’s hand slammed into the punching bag that Harley was holding still before moving it around to correct some of the darker woman’s hand-eye coordination that was often the result of the first hour on the floor of the quiet, downtown gym Joan often found herself dragged to by Harley [_ _ **reminiscent of the ones Joan had become a member of in New York and Detroit before she discovered that they really weren’t the best pick up guys—most of the men were too old, too young, very married**_ _] where they could enjoy the dark, subtle atmosphere, build up muscles and trash talk about their job. The blonde and much more experienced woman of the world seemed amused by how little of Joan’s weight went into the bag, but continued speaking.  
  
“He __**doesn’t**_ _need him.”  
  
“He has schizophrenia partnered with an extra identity that has a form on the physical plain—get real. If he didn’t need the little jerk, Scarface would vanish with all those drugs you and Bartholomew keep shoveling down Arnie’s throat like it’s a drainpipe. The thing might be nothing but trouble, but it’s certainly better than the big group of nothing he used to be friends with. Though, personally, I think Rhino would make a better friend; ‘least he doesn’t stare at your tits and make passes at you when you’re in some public stall excreting blood.”  
  
Joan missed her next punch at such a comment but knew far better than to question what had come out of her mouth. Though, the information was nice_…)  
  
The therapist looked down at the dummy to sneer at him ( _he was staring at her boobs, the little jackass_ ) and answer simply, “Why would you ask? You don’t even like art.”  
  
“It would still be nice to know where it came from.”  
  
Arnold shuffled in his seat at the tone Scarface was giving Joan, but didn’t make to say anything as Joan was still looking at his “boss” with narrow eyes.  
  
Huffing in and out some bad air from her system ( _a minor fog of disappointment and aggravation that in theory of the mind’s eye could seem to be the color of toxic green algae that required a gas mask to surface from_ ), the woman in her plaid shirt crossed her legs ( _jeans—when was the last time she wore jeans during session at work; it was almost as insane as anything else going on_ ) in mirror reflection of the dummy. She looked back up at her patient and ignored the piece of wood’s narrowed glass eyes.  
  
“I got them from The Bride of Frankenstein,” smile and success; Arnold almost jumped out of his skin at the pleasant joke falling from her lips in such a friendly way towards him, “She does good work, doesn’t she?”

 


	28. Better Still

_-:-_  
Behold the glory of the Great Red Dragon!  
-Red Dragon.

 

* * *

  
  
_“So, Harley,” Joan asked, quiet and gentle as possible as it was the first time in over a month that the ( **severely injured, damaged, scar-faced, emaciated, depressed** ) blonde had been coaxed out of her solitary—her request, or Joan would never have allowed it—cell to stop staring at her walls and come to session, “Are you, maybe, willing to tell me why you finally want to reform?”_   
  
_The patient that Joan had been friendly enough with, but not nearly attentive enough before she’d slipped into the dark side, lifted her head a couple times, dirty hair keeping their eyes from meeting. It hurt Joan greatly to get a glance at the open wounds along her eyes and shoulder, lower neck, her thin hands ( **there was not a thought in her head that Joan could fathom about what the former Harlequin was trying so hard to hide under her clothes every time one of the medical doctors went to her cell to check her out and she responded by screaming like a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions off her meds** ) in these motions, but she could deal; Harley had to live with it. Joan could deal._   
  
_After several minutes of silence, Joan had her patience rewarded by Harley croaking out ( **voice natural and desolate—as she used to be before all the violence** ) a rather cryptic answer, “Better to serve under Heaven than to reign within Hell…”_

* * *

 

“…But what does it mean?”  
  
( _The air is sweet now that the heating has turned back on from its self-imposed oblivion—an odd combination of the asylum’s not-so-natural scent and dust from the furnace set hot to the touch and into the air before filling every room to the degree of just above sixty. Not muggy and most of the lunatics in the basic wards didn’t start spouting about the devil and bogeymen_.)  
  
That crossword that their assigned doctor had given to Edward ( _how wonderful it was to be granted the use of his brain on solid work tools and soft pencils_ ) lay flat on the shared table between Jonathan, Jervis and Eddie himself, a little spoiled along the edges from being ruffled and needing words erased more than once here and there ( _how was the Riddler to know that Monroe was not the model for that vapid green fairy? What did it matter about two characters from Lady and the Tramp also starring in 101 Dalmatians_ ); but it was finished, the answer to the last question (actually, that was better reversed) plain to see. And still, the redheads and the blonde could not understand.  
  
“An odd thing to give a hint at, that’s for sure and certain,” Jervis hesitated, eyes riveted more securely on the answer to eleven-down ( _A Czechoslovakian Alice_ ; _brilliant film to view and consider, even though it had given the Mad Hatter of Gotham the very worst nightmares_ ) than the almost eerie and twisted answer to why their friend had left them without a word and without the secure knowledge that she was somewhere safe for six weeks rather than dead and buried somewhere in what could have been a pine box out in the wilderness where nobody would ever find her as long as Joker had his way about it, “Not much of an answer, really. More like the doorway to more questions.”  
  
“Many questions that I find will give me the worst migraine on earth,” Eddie bemoaned, folding his arms and then setting his head down like a bird in a nest; huffy and red-eyed from just attempting to write at every answer—the finished version much harder to put into ink like he often prided himself in doing.  
  
“The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun,” Jonathan read aloud ( _a faint flicker of memory forming before and into him like the scent of honey fresh from the bottle—not something he cared to recall from when he was still in college himself and had deigned to go to the New York Gallery on a lark to find out what most of the people avoided; the painting not one of them, but he had caught some of the few looking at vexed at the sight of the golden woman on the ground screaming at her plight before the monster on two legs and red as a devil_ ), but not seeming interested at all in Eddie’s chagrin, “A bit dramatic for Harley _now_.”  
  
They could all agree on that, certainly.

* * *

 

“You look like the cat who’s about to get a bath over there.”  
  
A brisk movement of air from nose and mouth escaped and bounced against the bangs set before her eyes as Harley breathed onto the tabletop she resided at in the lounge, eyes set on the brownie in the little tin carrier Selina and Joan and Dr. Thompkins insisted she carry around with her at all times. She had gone through the chore that was her lunch after her Ducklings had insisted she rest after the five sessions she’d had with the Rogues ( _Two-Face had been picked up and as Harvey had not been in control, she’d had a rather difficult time trying to get a word in that was not a condescending joke or just a straight insult of her person and office; Jervis had been more pleasant than usual, so she had to chew Bartholomew out for over-medicating the Hatter again_ ) otherwise they wouldn’t fill out her paperwork. She couldn’t have that added to her amassing heap of problems on her rather wobbly plate of obligation, so she obliged them with the meal of a hardboiled egg from the cafeteria and two pieces of pizza left over in the freezer from two days before.  
  
For this she was rewarded with them—even Joan!—abandoning her for a meeting with Dr. Arkham about actually using their pharmacology degrees and not over-using narcotics on the patients more prone to tonguing their meds for either get high after collecting enough, or an attempt at suicide. The only one besides Harley herself in the lounge ( _wishing there was a toilet to flush away the brownie that was her own personal shame whenever someone who didn’t know her situation found out about it—nasty remarks about energy waves and hippies and how the government should tighten regulations that often, much to her own glee, led to her own words and barbs that were much sharper thrust upon them in the most civil way she knew_ ) at present was Steven Carlisle attempting to be funny and chat her up while sipping from the coffee he always brought back from the city on his lunch break—a strange concoction of Warm Butter Rum and Egg Nog that had her wondering at a possible alcoholic binge he might have picked up after Batman had let him out of that tank Ivy had kept him in.  
  
Her teeth clicked before her middle finger rose in a well-known suggestion and she replied while he took another swallow from his drink, “Fuck off, Cocker Spaniel.”  
  
She placed the brownie into her mouth ( _how could those stoners of the world think that the little tidbits of Cannabis didn’t leave behind a taste that was awful when it get stuck in the back of the throat and made one want to vomit was so beyond her in the swallowing_ ) while he choked on his drink and smiled to herself.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small Notes:
> 
> The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun/“Better to serve under Heaven than to reign within Hell…”: This painting and Paradise Lost have always been dark figures in my mind that needed a way to get out and now I’m finally doing just that here. At first I didn’t want to—my version of Harley and the rest were supposed to be lighter than what Nolan, Burton and Bruce Tim have done, but then I considered getting into this that I might just turn on my head and do something rash with the characters that I often wouldn’t. I guess the floodgates open now.
> 
> “Many questions that I find will give me the worst migraine on earth,”: I know that we’re all thinking ‘But it’s the Riddler!’ However, all of the patients in Arkham are emotional cripples, so I figured that even if he is getting precious knowledge out of the deal, he’d rather eat glass than actually get CLOSER to a person. Just sayin’.


	29. Warning Bells

_-:-_  
We will solemnly swear, right here, right now, that we will be friends only.  
-Frida (The Miramax Film).

 

* * *

  
  
 _There’s always a problem when giving in to letting the interns actually start up the horrendous task of interviewing and “doctoring” the Rogues. For one thing, the Rogues ( **every last one of them now; even Jervis—the baby of the batch** ) had been there longer and paid attention to more and could easily cut down anyone stupid enough to buy into the crap they shoveled out of themselves specifically for first-timers ( **Joker stuck out in the mind as witness to that; horrible** ). For another thing, picking out one intern for one specific Rogue to oversee ( **this worked out both ways, whether the other doctors could acknowledge that or not and then keep the thought away from their own egos** ) was time-consuming and gave the master of these ceremonies a headache._  
  
The little wooden hammer that the waiter had brought to the table as something to assist in the breaking open of a fresh lobster ( _shell hard and moist, butter brushed over it as finely as an artist might use badger hair to smooth out the lining of an ocean wave_ ), whistled through the air before it struck clean through the back of the lobster. The crackle was loud, but firm and not so uncommon as quite a few other patrons of the outside restaurant were setting about to demolish their own lobsters. Joan allowed for it to happen as Harley was much stronger than herself and got the sea creature open with another couple whacks ( _the scent wafting up in delicious waves as the sight of everything Joan would taste was revealed; the hammer set down on the little plate it had come on_ ).   
  
A little splatter of the creature’s own juices and the liquid butter spattered into the air and two drops landed on the pictures and files Harley had brought along despite Joan’s protests as the other doctor brought the blonde with her to dinner. As Joan had explained it, she had two extra tickets because her parents had cancelled dinner with her in favor of tickets to the opera they had been waiting for along the timeline of nine months (‘ _That’s bullshit,’ Harley snickered after Joan had told her that the two Lelands were going to see Pagliaci—also known as the most depressing opera on earth_ ), and had the bright idea to bring Harley—who had been happy enough eating five meat pizza in her apartment while going over who the hell to assign to the interns—and save the other ticket for another weekend.   
  
Harley wiped her hand of the liquid that stuck to her from residue on the hammer and then wiped the drips of butter and lobster juice from the picture of Poison Ivy she had attached to a picture of Kate. She didn’t like the feeling of dead fish-creature on her palm and swiped away Joan’s own napkin in hopes that it would remove even the smell of the creature ( _from her palm, from the air around the table, from the entire damn area of the restaurant; disgusting, disgusting, disgusting_ ) as she rubbed her hands against themselves and the napkin as if trying to warm herself from the cold—or she was attempting a prayer ( _such a laughable thought as she enjoyed the cold recently—almost as much as Victor Fries—and she barely believed in God anymore_ ).  
  
“So, I hear from the rumor mill that you’ve been going out recently?”  
  
White teeth bit into a hot French roll she’d picked up from the little basket in the center of the table as Harley glanced at Joan ( _it was amazing that she always brought up Harley’s recovery when she was eating so as to encourage Harley to open up on the topic put before the both her; an annoying habit to be sure and certain_ ) and replied with the piece of bread tucked into the back of her throat much like a penguin would do, “What rumor mill? You listen to most of the others at the asylum barely more than I do.”  
  
Joan swallowed a piece of the lobster, savoring the taste, “Edward told me it was one of the clues uncovered in that crossword you gave him.”  
  
It wasn’t difficult to see that Harley was amused by this truth, “Okay, Joan, when Eddie tells you something about me, that usually means he’s just trying to get out of explaining about his childhood.”  
  
“No, no,” Joan waved a finger ( _an almost comical thing as her mother had talked her into getting a manicure; fake nails adorned all of her smooth fingers and every single one of them the color of Frida Khalo’s heart in that double portrait made after her husband asked for a divorce_ ) and swallowed a piece of her own French bun, “We weren’t talking about his childhood. We were talking about who he considered comrades in arms and who he might like to look after him if he reformed within the year.”  
  
The blonde seemed disturbed by this statement ( _amplified and more by Joan swallowing a much larger bite of the lobster, fingers peeling away the shell and piling the pieces up like little bits of plaster that Harley collected around her apartment complex laundry room and put atop the folding table as a kind of nod to the superintendent to repaint the fucking place_ ) and responded as best she could with, “Yeah right. And so what,” she went on, eyes not wanting to look at the lobster or Joan’s face ( _it wasn’t alive anymore, why should it matter if it was beaten, broken open and then devoured_?), “if I’m going out these days? That doesn’t mean I’m dating, it means I’m having sex.”  
  
“Yes, I have a college degree or two, I believe I can figure that out for myself,” Joan smirked, not at all pleased by the tone of the woman across from her in regards to her “romantic” life and speculations. Back inside the restaurant where all the patrons collected their food, there was a loud racket like glass breaking, but neither of them paid much attention; things like that happened in restaurants all the time.  
  
“I just want to know who he is, that’s all,” the older of the two went on, shy but unsure, “I worry about you, and so do the patients.”  
  
If there was a way to contort the face so it could say just how little it believed in that statement, there was no doubt that Harley’s would have made the attempt to move and change into that, but seeing as there was nothing so outrageous that the human facial muscles could perform in just that way, her own stayed blank-bordering on bemused at such a thought. She didn’t believe the others cared much about her at all, really; Joan probably only did out of some obligation of Harley having been her patient for a good long time.  
  
“Whatever,” the gymnast ( _she would always be a gymnast if that body of hers could speak the confirmation of its own beliefs, despite all the pain signals it probably would never be able to turn off until a better drug was invented_ ) shrugged, still disbelieving.

 

 


	30. In Which a Portal Opens up and the Walk Through is Easy…and All Else Goes to Hell

_-:-_  
I hope the exit is joyful  
And I hope never to return.  
-Frida Khalo.

 

* * *

  
  
The first thing that most people tended to forget after getting to know Harley was that she was previously a villain. A very prominent and notorious villain. As such is the way of most that get around the law ( _oh, and she missed that, even if in recent days she was far more content to take a walk around the park with the hyenas without getting shot at than anything else),_ things happen that one shouldn’t talk about. Hiding places for loot, escape routes, ways in and out of other countries, allies that could do favors for very little in exchange… and universal travel.  
  
Dimensional travel was _bad_.  
  
Not just in the vibrating frequency of Harley’s own universe ( _a lovely place, even though those few times Joker had taken her off planet it was mostly to be used as bait to an over-sexed warlord so the clown could steal weapons to sell or play with in Gotham_ ), but in going to other Earths. Other Earths, Harley tended to classify in color.   
  
There were Blue Earths ( _she could almost enjoy those places where most governments were the same, where there were friendly aliens about, where there were the same villains and heroes—though, sometimes those were backwards as made apparent when on one Blue Earth she took note that there was a perfectly pleasant Lex Luthor that led the Justice League and a Crime Syndicate run by a human-ish Not-Superman_ ) that she could tolerate. There were Green Earths ( _odd and eccentric, but with few super beings except for gods as only people and writers could understand in their own minds_ ) that freaked her out even in her jester’s uniform. There were also, of course ( _she had only been to a handful—fifteen at best—and never for very long; danger was everywhere and she never knew how long she could manage_ ), Red Earths that she didn’t really like as most were collective of government run heroes, civil wars, gods running amuck and confused at being introduced to human beings after a long time of not paying attention, and aliens that tended to be more negative than her own Blue Earth ( _how wonderful it was to have a Batman with his allies, to have Rogues of different sects; how awful it would be to live in a place where Meta-humans were called mutants—as if it were a curse instead of a blessing—and the heroes had only the code of their own governments to live by_ ).  
  
What a joy ( _she gags on the word, on the thought, like bile because all her feelings of the notion have been warped by several years in her own self-made hell_ ) that she should find herself walking through a low bridge in the park with Bud and Lou on either side of her on the way to the half-frozen duck pond to feed the pathetic specimen of some of the few winter birds that stayed through the season with Selina in her line of sight, arm raised in greeting ( _a long French bread loaf wrapped and held in both arms, making her look somewhat less dangerous in her black pitch peacoat, heavy army-grade boots and worn jeans; almost pretty instead of sad_ ), and instead of being able to take a breath and call a greeting on the other side of the echoing tunnel…   
  
( _Sulfur and wind from the bruising impact of a storm, a kind of circle-the-drain quality to motion that came with being sucked into a whirlpool; one body passing through another that hurt when hearts connected for just a moment and exchanged impressionistic feelings_ )  
  
Of course, she would have to be blinded by light as sickening as the kind she often woke up to in hospital and find herself not in her Gotham park with her babies, but on some friggin’ snow covered city street ( _maybe New York, she could barely see the sky and there was a taxi she nearly smashed her knee into that was exactly where she was going, to step over a stone about the size of a cat’s head, with the right sort of license for New York_ ), confronted by some large blonde man with a hammer ( _not of her caliber, no, but bulky and held in one large, meaty fist_ ) about to smash into her; another man behind him running with a bow and arrow, ready to shoot at Bud or Lou.  
  
“What the f--!”  
  
Of course, it was only natural instinct that kept the man from crashing into her. She nailed him in the groin and threw her bread at the archer, immediately motioning her babies behind her. The giant of a man with the hammer didn’t fall to both knees as she would have liked, but he did lean on the taxi that hurt her knee and the archer looked too amused at her raised haunches to even attempt the fire of an arrow at the hyenas.  
  
“Well, well,” the archer smiled, coming closer at a polite pace that stopped next to his blonde friend whose face had finally caught up with the pain of his groin, “We lose Loki and Doom, and Captain and get a woman with a pair of African animals. Fury is going to love this.”  
  
Harley did not like the familiarity that came to mind at that name and that tone.  
  
The hyenas whined at her side as the archer spoke ( _thank god it was English at least, or she might have found herself in trouble; the few other languages she knew were for off-planet or among people with much darker skin—or principals, the few she had left—than her own_ ) into a commlink for pickup and a an agent Coulson for a little inter-dimensional cha-cha.

* * *

  
  
“Hello, nice lady…”  
  
Steve Rogers, Captain America, found himself wanting very much to scream, but felt that if he did, he would probably pass out. The whip ( _it was leather and black, the similarity between it and the one he’d once seen in a pin-up mag that Bucky had hid from his mother forever was uncanny to his eye; and definitely real_ ) that had wrapped around his neck when he passed through that portal Loki had opened and Steve had stepped through—how many times, how many times had Fury and Tony and Thor told him not to walk into a portal without backup?—was tight and was most likely going to leave marks.   
  
“Who the hell are you and where did Harley and those mutts go, you twerp?!” Selina hissed, heeled boot ( _not really appropriate for the park, but there was a broad and not-cracked walkway, so she really didn’t have to walk in the dirt_ ) pressing hard into his chest. She was exceptionally beautiful, that was for sure, but Steve really couldn’t think about that as he was trying to figure out a way to get off his back without hurting her.  
  
“Uh, I-I don’t know who that is,” he wheezed, really wishing he hadn’t dropped his shield in the fight with Thor’s brother ( _also tacking on the wish that he would be saved by another person that wasn’t hostile very, very soon_ ).  
  
Selina frowned down at the very tall boy ( _he couldn’t be older than twenty-three, barely older than her boyfriend’s first adopted son_ ) beneath her and sighed at the not-at-all-wanted realization that he really didn’t know where he was. Obviously he either wasn’t from around Gotham…or maybe her Earth entirely.  
  
She lessened her weight on his chest, heel no longer cutting through his odd little suit that reminded her of both Superman and Wonder-Bitch ( _Bruce would frown at her still using that title for Diana, but Selina was Catwoman and kitties didn’t care what anyone thought_ ). Gloved fingers traveled into her pants pocket and pulled out her cellphone, dialing the number for Bruce’s “special number” to actually use it for an emergency.

* * *

  
  


“I hate Red Earths.”  
  
The agent ( _pleasant, kind, to the point and good enough to provide to her request for a coffee that didn’t taste like battery acid in a portable cup as big as a wine bottle_ ) still didn’t seem to understand what she meant by that, but wasn’t going to ask again when she explained simply that she was from a Blue Earth and would like to get back as soon as possible and could she please use the money in her own wallet at her hip to pay for a hotel because she didn’t much care to stay in the building they sat in at present as that ‘Ironman’ had hit on her in a way similar to her ex-husband?  
  
“I’m sorry, but we have a policy about inter-dimensional travelers staying on SHIELD grounds at all times. The last one—I believe he was called Jonah Hex—helped out with some of the missions until we sent him back, but I’m afraid staying in an hotel in the city would be out of the question for you Dr. Quinzel,” agent Coulson stated firmly, but with a little compassion at her look of having already known the answer before he gave it, “The rooms here are very comfortable.”  
  
She sighed and Lou looked up from where his head was on his paws, Bud still pacing the wide hall they were in, other agents giving Coulson, the strange blonde woman and the hyenas a wide berth while still doing their duty in keeping the Avengers ( _a strange thing to call a lot of heroes, though Harley knew there were worse things to be called_ ) from trying to eavesdrop, “I suppose I’ll have to abide by your rules. At least you’re not trying to put me in a cage.”  
  
“Oh, I should hope we’re better than that,” Coulson smiled, standing from his chair to brush the ruffles out of his coat when he’d taken a seat, “Even if some of our policies are quite rigid.”  
  
“As long as those same policies get me home… preferably before the weekend is out and I have to go back to work.”  
  
He tilted his head at how her tone and feeling for her own words were shaky and drawn at best; almost like she didn’t want to go back at all, but a sense of obligation made her acknowledge her duty, “We will get you home; a friend of our own is needed back here as well, after all. Where _do_ you work?”  
  
“The insane asylum most notorious on our Earth,” she grinned behind the lining of her coffee cup, sipping at the hot drink that did not taste awful and not at all like bitter almonds that would mean it had poison, which would not have been a wise move on the part of Coulson or anyone else, “Arkham Asylum. It serves the people in reforming the criminally insane of Gotham. Most unpleasant, but I like it enough since the staff put up with me.”  
  
There was little doubt that he was very disconcerted at her look of content at those words ( _those words when all the others that had formed in her answers to his questions had either been bland, secretive or almost bitter_ ), but he said nothing about it. He simply asked if she would like to meet some of the people that would be passing about before he took her to see her room.  
  
She canted her head much like she had observed Selina do around Mr. Wayne, and got up to follow him; the hyenas quick to trot behind her—both babies and guardians to their mistress.

* * *

  
  
He was on one of the Other Earths Dr. Banner had talked about. He didn’t like this one at all.  
  
This Batman ( _Steve recalled when he was little and had imagined a Bogeyman in his closet that looked a bit like a cross between a rabid black dog and a scarecrow he had seen while trick-or-treating; which wasn’t nearly as frightening as the man that had come when Miss Kyle had called him_ ) he had been talking to for about an hour detailing very specifically that he had not meant to end up in Gotham City—which was not a friendly place; not at all from the appearance of the very big bat cave he had been brought to while blindfolded and scared almost enough to wet himself—did not seem pleased that he had no way to get back. He was even less pleased when he’d answered repeatedly that, no, he didn’t know who Dr. Quinzel or Harley Quinn was and, no, he did not know what Loki had said to open the portal ( _Latin and Arcane? He could barely hear anything when he had been dumb enough to take a leap at the ebony haired liesmith_ ).  
  
“Well, at least you seem to be telling the truth,” Batman stated, cape swishing around him as he moved from his guest and over to his computer. That little boy in the much brighter outfit that had been there since Steve had been relieved of his blindfold walking over to the blonde hero to give him a pair of chocolate cookies he’d brought from wherever he’d been hiding while Steve had been interrogated.   
  
It seemed that Batman was ignoring Steve now and Selina had been gone since she’d let Captain America off his back to be stowed away into the Batmobile. The boy spoke to him pleasantly enough as the blonde took up one of the cookies, “Hello, I’m Batman’s partner Robin. Sorry about the big guy and his girlfriend. They get a little anxious when Harley get’s herself into trouble.”  
  
“This happens often, then?”  
  
Robin shrugged, trotting and then bounding (‘ _Like a squirrel,’ Steve thought, chewing thoughtfully on the God-blessed cookie he was holding)_ over to some plain clothes that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere on the glass case containing a set of playing cards that made up a Deuce and then just one card that held a brilliantly painted Joker ( _that card had some red liquid staining it, and Steve suddenly felt unclean for thinking it was something pretty_ ).  
  
“To Harley? Like clock-work,” Robin smiled, plopping the clothes into the Captain’s lap, “Here, these should be more comfortable than that suit you’ve got on, Mr. Rogers.”  
  
“Please,” Steve smiled ( _disgustingly kind and polite in Tim’s opinion; a blonde Clark Kent ten years younger and very human_ ) as he stepped behind the changing divider even though there was nobody there to see him naked but the Dynamic Duo, “Call me Steve.”

* * *

 

“See this?” Dr. Banner smiled, circling in blue marker the anomaly showing on the screen between himself and Tony Stark ( _who had seemed bored when he walked into the lab, because in meeting the strange blonde that smelled an awful lot like his basement when he had first been working on his Ironman suit—all metal and actual iron, which on a human being would seem to lead to connotations to murder and bloodshed—he had been disappointed in that all of his flirting had gone over her head or been tossed back in her face; but he was feeling much more perked up at the thought of inter-dimensional traveling_ ) that appeared just after Loki and Doom disappeared into thin air and Steve had gone through, and just before it closed and Dr. Quinzel popped through.  
  
“A flash phasing pocket doorway to an inter-locking dimension,” Tony grinned ( _wide and expansive, white teeth showing like they meant it_ ), “Which means our very own Boy Scout is probably perfectly fine and easily retrievable if we can zero in on his frequency with his communicator—supposing he didn’t do anything as stupid as lose the thing on the way in.”  
  
“Friend Tony, friend Banner.”  
  
The doors to the lab banged open the way they always did when Thor, god of thunder, made an entrance, and both scientists looked over to find the giant blonde looking emotionally scarred with a tankard of warm goat’s milk ( _a disgusting taste to the human beings in the building, but Pepper and Natasha had forbade him to drink his mead during working hours_ ) shaking a little in both hands. A strange sight that had both highly intelligent men blinking to make sure there was no hallucinating.  
  
“Something the matter there, Thor buddy?” Tony clucked, crossing his legs on his stool as the immortal lumbered over ( _he always made noise in everything he did, almost like it came with his title, but these steps were weighed down and as he closed in to take a seat for himself Tony had an image of a puppy being run over twice by a semi—poor, pathetic baby_ ) to the other two.  
  
“When will the other world maiden be gone?”  
  
‘ _Oh, my god, she made him cry_ ,’ was another thought that came to mind and the billionaire bit the inside of his cheek to prevent the urge to laugh.  
  
Bruce circled another few almost invisible specks on the screen before he replied to the blonde, “We think, actually, within the day, if we’re very lucky. Why?”  
  
“She made some biting comments about my brother and, I think, with the greatest haste we could get friend Steven back, the best it will be for ourselves.”

* * *

 

The trip back to the park he’d been plopped into was a little more pleasant than being taken away from there, but that was only because he was allowed to ride back with Robin on a motorbike and not blindfolded. As it seemed, since he was from another universe and there was the glowing possibility to be sent back to his place and dimension of home very soon, it would be fine that he’d know the general way to the Batcave. The clothes in the plastic bag slung over his shoulder like a knapsack felt reassuring when the teenager parked the bike along the lining of the trees to look around the bridge.  
  
“Bats says that if we keep you close to the site you were transferred in from, it might be easier to send you back. Like a piece of metal around magnets,” Robin explained, walking ahead of the other like he owned the park ( _a form of territorial knowing; Steve could tell without asking that he was one of the dominant forces in this city called Gotham—nobody was likely to bother him even if he was wandering about with a strange man three times his size_ ). Steve smiled like the blue eyed boy he was, stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk and happy to look over at some of the Cardinals and sparrows on the frozen river, pecking at the residue of seeds Selina had dropped when she’d taken out her whip and decked Steve.  
  
“I suppose that could work,” Steve responded, searching for something to fill in for conversation as they passed by one of those add posts all parks came with for people to hang up flyers ( _flyers in the one they walked by, sloshing around some muddied snow in Kevlar boots and simple black shoes given out of kindness or convenience; those twisted and once wet papers asking for knowledgeable dog-walkers and to be on the look-out for someone called Bane who had escaped from prison weeks ago_ ), “Is it very difficult to fight crime in this city?”  
  
Robin ( _not his real name, but Steve knew he wasn’t allowed to ask for a real name when the person wore a mask and worked for the greater good_ ) shrugged with emotion quietly tucked away where a normal person couldn’t see it, “It’s Gotham. We’re one of the worst cities in America compared to, say, Metropolis with Superman flying around, or Keystone and Central City with the Flash clan. But not as bad compared to Hub with Question having to walk in the dark with few allies and Bludhaven with just my predecessor flying alone.”  
  
Those were not cities that Steve could recognize from memory, so they were possibly only places that resided on this Earth with its much darker shadows. But a little piece of information gleamed from that depressing answer was worth Steve’s head hurting a little.  
  
“Predecessor? Like a relative—“  
  
( _The function of a body can stop completely when another echo of reality opens and tightens its hold on what it wants; danger can result with the energy of a synapse dying or not enough blood moving around. But this did not have to stand_ )  
  
The words evaporated into the cold evening air, but their friendliness did not drop as Steve Rogers glowed an almost frightening blue and then _pulsed_ into pure energy. That energy pulsed like a rapid heart murmur twice more before it grew into something that looked like a door, fixed with three clicks of a clock’s insides, and then left behind three blue energy pulses. Before Robin could call for Batman on his commlink or even swallow a bit of air, those three energy signatures lost the blue shine and congealed into Harley and her hyenas.  
  
She seemed pleased to see Robin and her own dark city as opposed to wherever she had previously been and smiled gingerly down at the red cape.  
  
“Well, well, you seem to have been playing tour guide.”

* * *

 

“Thor—please, I-I c-can’t…”  
  
“Please don’t ever leave again like that my friend!”  
  
Tony, from his extremely unhappy spot at his computer ( _amazing, the second after Captain America had gotten back, the entire wall of computers exploded outwards in a mass of melted metal and the heady scent of Loki’s own magic, which really didn’t make sense seeing as if he was even a foot within the premises the alarms would go off_ ), absently flipped open his cellphone and took a photo of Thor holding Steve up in civilian clothes ( _the Lion King opening sequence_ ), bruises along the vaguely smaller man’s neck that reminded Tony of a very fun night in Florida a few months back with three lovely young dominant, sadistic women that really knew how to have a good time.  
  
He would prod the man later for details on why he had changed and what it was like. After he had his lab cleaned up and the smell of magic left the room.

 


	31. Humanity, a Nymph

  * _-:-  
_ _What a death! What a chance! What a surprise! My will has chosen life! Still it has had me spooked and many others besides!  
-The Piano._




 

* * *

  
  
It was a very unusual five-minutes-into-the-therapy so far. Edward was very quiet being brought in to see Leland ( _amazing, not a single insult directed at the guards or their IQ scores on their SAT’s_ ) and had remained in a very passive disposition right up until the door was shut and then they were left alone. At which point ( _Joan really wished she still kept her notes on immediate hand, suddenly; the details here were spectacularly vivid in each second moving through time_ ) he got off of the little duvet in the room and started pacing in circles around it.  
  
Joan vaguely entertained the thought of asking him if he had taken his medication last night but dismissed the venture when she opened her mouth and he **glared** at her. Not the usual, irksome glare he gave everyone, but the glare of Bane confronting Batman head on and with the added advantage of knowing the landscape they were fighting in. His mouth was tight, his hair was in disarray ( _she would make a note of that later, of course; he was like a princess with the way he kept himself in a presentable way even if his current residence was the insane asylum—hair swishing around probably meant bad things in a general sort of way_ ) and when he finally stopped pacing he was turned toward the door and stamped his foot hard to the floor before taking a seat and not looking at her.  
  
“Edward?”  
  
The Riddler tucked his hand into his asylum given scrubs and pulled out the crossword puzzle that Harley ( _Bartholomew had practically turned into an Opera singer with how loudly he had admonished after finding out how Eddie got something forbidden and had been ignored in favor a lunch where a cheese burger the size of a piglet’s head was devoured happily because of some especially high grade Mary Jane purchased the day before and eaten in medicated brownies before the main course of that day’s lunch_ ) had given him about three weeks before and looked back at Joan to toss her the paper.  
  
She didn’t touch it when the frayed and wrinkled thing landed on her desk, but she did read the one clue highlighted in bright red marker with a little apprehension that Jonathan Crane would gladly soak up if she had exhibited it around him.   
  
The therapist didn’t say anything and so the silence reigned until Edward finally spoke himself, “I am annoyed.”  
  
“…Uh-huh.”  
  
“I want to actually be wrong about coming to the only conclusion available to me, for the first time in my life. That, and I think that if I am right, I will immediately try to throttle Joker until he finally dies. Is that wrong?”  
  
Confusion didn’t suit Joan. She didn’t look good dressed in it and Eddie was one to agree by throwing her a life raft to keep her from drowning.  
  
He waved at the paper, “ _The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun_. Blake painting with two versions and both with a foreshadowing of a catastrophe about to befall a woman at the hands of a monster. I think we both know who the two characters stand for. I don’t want to know about the rest. In fact, I’m ignoring the rest until I’m absolutely sure that there’s no other way to tell the story.”  
  
He got up to start pacing again and Joan didn’t like that she could only barely remember the painting from the movie he’d picked out a few days before for group ( _Red Dragon, with the popular horror/drama figure Hannibal Lecter before he met Clarice Starling—she had been wondering about that when his answers for choosing it, when the others discussed it, had been painfully vague_ ) and the way his voice darkened in saying that he would not consider the implications offered to him by the blonde they both knew ( _perhaps even both respected_ ). It left a nasty knot in her stomach that didn’t often come with seeing Eddie as a patient like so many of the others.

* * *

 

“What are you doing?”  
  
The voice, while pleasant and almost non-judgmental in all the ways it mattered, set about to cause a little heat to mix in the pit of Joan’s stomach and collide into the being of Severe Annoyance that Harley often exhibited and Joan never understood until that exact moment. Standing on a tall stool in the infirmary of the asylum on one foot ( _the other sticking out in the fashion of an inexperienced ballerina on crystal meth_ ) while pawing inside the cupboards that were way too high for her liking and suddenly confronted by Carlisle at her elbow, attempting to keep her from falling down. In the act of being caught at something not-exact-wrong but one she didn’t want to explain, she could understand why he seemed so annoying to Harley.  
  
For lack of anything better to say to the man at her hip ( _he always seemed to be carrying around coffee since he came back from his self-imposed exile, burning hot to the touch of his lips and leaving her with a feeling that he’d picked up some masochistic tendencies while doing whatever it was he did away from the asylum; sipping from the cup as she bowed her other leg back to the stool and steadied on her own_ ), Dr. Leland waved him away from trying to move her and continued to try and take the file she was looking for out of its hiding place, “What? Nothing. Just, um, going over some old facts.”  
  
“In the infirmary where the only files that are kept here happen to be about injuries to the patients, I’d assume you’re following up on some mentioned abuse one of the patients might have complained about?” Carlisle ventured a guess, moving his hand away from her elbow as she got what she wanted and made her way off the stool with a rather large case of files—exactly one name on it. Joan hid that name against her stomach as she positioned the case and hopped down. Avoiding the question would be excellent and a little misdirection could only help her there.  
  
“…Yes?”  
  
“Who made the complaint?” he asked, an incline of his head in the backwards direction showing off his disbelief at such a thought ( _few of the patients had complained as of late, unless it was to protest about another inmate—the guards had been laying off dealing out any figuratively large bruises in fear of a tongue lashing from certain known parties and Dr. Arkham who had been listening to the lashing and been picking up on ways of bettering the asylum because of it_ ).   
  
“…Edward. So I’m looking into it to cover all of the bases. I’m not sure there’s any validity until I go over his objections with a fine-tooth comb, but it’s better than dealing with a backlash if he tells his court-mandated attorney.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
An awkward pause of silence followed a few seconds before Joan smiled ( _how degenerate was it that she learned from the patients how to fake being pleasant when she really needed to—truthfully_?) at the other therapist and walked out of the infirmary. She passed by Baby Doll cuffed to one of the beds on the way out and returned the wave offered to her as best she could while carrying the heavy object she’d come down for.

* * *

 

How was it that, during the last year that Harley was in the care of Arkham Asylum and not included in its payroll, the files on her physical state of being were so horribly limited as to border on negligence? How was it possible that when the staff was being paid well to offer up services to people who actually wanted their help ( _true, it hadn’t applied to put Harley in that category until after she finally admitted that being with Joker wasn’t going to work out at all—explicitly—but the point remained valid_ ) that they didn’t do their very best to see it through?  
  
The reasons the patients seemed to have for doubting the doctors and the world at large seemed to appear clearer as Joan rifled through all the papers of Harley’s medical file the infirmary still had available. She didn’t think the woman had messed with it ( _big deal for her, not at all. She already took anything that could give a hint to where she was living; why should she give a damn about covering up just how often she’d had broken bones and burns and such when the inmates already knew about it anyway_?) but it was ridiculous how most of the dates were mixed up and just turned her stomach at realizing how often the blonde had been administered to the infirmary or even taken straight to the county hospital until she was healthy enough to be put back among the other Rogues. Some of her medical accounts were mixed up so badly that Joan had to stick them in a separate pile from the one she was working on ( _abdominal problems—too many to count, by God—that made Joan want to sic Batman on Joker the further she got into it_ ) and just ignore them in favor of stuff she thought was relevant for the information Edward was trying desperately to get her to look into so he didn’t have to confront it and go ballistic on Joker ( _possibly getting himself killed in the process in a rather sickly-creative way_ ).  
  
She was being an enabler, but if any of the other doctors came in to ask about it, she would lie. She was getting much better at that as a whole.  
  
Whatever left Eddie spooked was going to give her nightmares, but she wasn’t going to ask Harley about it for the three-thousandth time in almost two years. She could figure this out on her own.

 


	32. Funnybone

_-:-_  
Lying is bad. Or so we’re told. Constantly, from birth.  
“Honesty is the best policy.”  
“The truth shall set you free.”  
“I chopped down the cherry tree.”  
Whatever.  
-Grey’s Anatomy.

 

* * *

  
  
Hiro was getting better at being able to tell ahead of time when his days with the other two interns would be good or bad. It varied in degrees of seeing into the future by observing Joan ( _the sort of boss to their boss, but only so far as to be listened to and often for not very long at all before being ignored entirely_ ) and the other doctors’ quirks, but the one way, he found, to surely tell if they would be yelled at and ordered to do the unpleasant or something “fun” was to observe Dr. Quinzel’s perception of Hot or Cold that day.   
  
It was simple enough. From what information he’d gotten on her from listening to the patients bitch and then keeping an ear turned up for slander from the staff, his and the girls’ boss had a big problem with perception of pain. The full details could never be explored for her own personal reasons, ( _i.e. she had beat the shit out of the last doctors and nurses who treated her during her last year as an actual patient_ ), but even she—former criminal extraordinaire—had her own tells.  
  
If she was in a vaguely good mood, she would quickly go to her own office, fire up her weird teapot that looked straight out of a 1950’s French film and then carry it around for a few hours while it still retained enough heat that required her to wear her black coat and a pair of leather gloves or risk burning her skin onto the terra cotta kettle. It was very disturbing to actually watch her carry the pot around like a teddy bear or something, but that usually meant that they could all get handed a good—intelligent, really—case to go over for the day. If she was craving heat, she was feeling vaguely affectionate. ( _Kate commented that it was like she turned into a giant, humanoid snake during the night and they shouldn’t take it as a good sign, which Becky had agreed to. Neither of them really considered the good things to come from this, they just didn’t like to see the blonde happy; or so was Hiro’s opinion_.)  
  
If they found themselves needed to prepare for a war, then they had to steer clear of her when she brought in a giant bag of ice ( _commonly she liked to buy the kind that looked freshly chipped out of a big and blue glacier, but she wasn’t picky at all_ ) and tucked some of the cold marbles of water into her gothic doctor’s coat pockets. If she did it all morning then by noon the staff constantly complained about drops of water all over the halls ( _blood condensed in it, but in small, trace amounts that seemed only to be the residuals of red dye coming out of a new sweater_ ), to which she always replied for them to suck an appendage of the body that one in three transgendered individuals would very much like to have ( _Hiro often crossed his legs when she said those things; it seemed like she didn’t like the male organisms around her and he didn’t want to give any more provocation than he had to in asking her to sign a form he needed_ ).  
  
As Hiro walked into the asylum lounge to grab some paperwork he had forgotten the previous night, he was relieved to find the boss lady cradling her teapot in both hands with her gloves on ( _if he looked close enough toward her wrists, he could count all the blue veins coming to the surface just before the leather of the gloves cut them off and hid the rest_ ). A content smile was on her face and she ignored his presence as he grabbed his papers and left with only a passing glance his way, picking herself up from her spot to head back to her own therapy room.   
  
As the entrance and exit to the lounge closed, Hiro allowed himself a little treat in three quarters given to the snack machine and a little graham/caramel/chocolate thing. It felt crisp and delicious on his tongue.

* * *

 

Sometimes, things that appear to be are not.  
  
Which was why, unfortunately, the guards brought in Eddie for his appointment with Harley and it seemed, when they set him on his seat and left them to themselves, nothing was amiss. Nothing unusual, as far as the guards were concerned as of recent months, in Harley sitting on her desk and going over the last few bunches of erotica with her teapot cradled in her lotus-position legs ( _flat against her stomach and better feeling than a mother bird with an egg, they assumed from her content look_ ), soaking up the warmth and greeting the Riddler with a light smile. Even the bandages along her knuckles didn’t raise a quirked brow.  
  
( _No matter how good a version of Cannabis the suppliers could give, it was never instant; it took time to settle into the blood when eaten and took about fifteen or ten minutes if smoked. As it was gone over before, hospital grade sedatives were useless and no longer held sway over a body that had been cut open and left in disrepair too many times to count. Sometimes, the only thing that can help is to hit or be hit until being knocked out to wake up in the dark later in a freezing cold showed with blood flowing down the drain; bits and pieces of debris following after the red trails_.)  
  
It had gone well enough the first twelve minutes. He’s spoken a brief word about wishing she wouldn’t bring in those papers anymore (“ _Really, Harleen, haven’t you finished them yet?”)_ and her grinning while bringing the flattened papers together and setting them inside the desk and out of sight (“ _Almost, almost, but not quite. They’re gone now, you can look away from the window_.”), teapot moving around in her lap before she lifted it from its position to set it to the side of the desk with a little twist of her upper torso towards the right, while her lower half stayed still to keep her from falling off the desk.  
  
Her day would have gone well if only she had just gotten off the desk and put the teapot in one of the weird drawers along the walls. Then maybe a tiny piece of something from years ago ( _four years and a rather nasty fall that had lead to a lot of surgeries with doctors doing exactly what they needed to keep her alive, but not completely paying attention to certain debris that were just about the size of a pin_ ) wouldn’t have shifted against the bone it had been hiding against for those years, to move into a certain direction around her nerves that were clustered and not altogether dead from abuse.  
  
When she dropped the teapot, Eddie had made to give a comment about clumsiness. This was cut off, however, by her ( _gloveless, she didn’t like to wear gloves around old friends; it made them nervous, she supposed_ ) hands gripping the edge of her desk to keep her from falling off as she screamed.  
  
Being the way he was, having lived the life he had in Gotham and then Arkham, the first reaction Eddie had was to jump away at the hideous noise and the way the blonde was writhing in misery like an animal at the side of the road after being hit by a car. Riddler in costume would have observed the scene from afar and let it unravel until she was either dead or just silent, but Eddie himself…  
  
( _She’d never actually screamed around any of the Rogues. Maybe she had made a noise synonymous with the word around Joker and only privately, but around the others she only made little squeaks and groans and mumbled exclamations of discomfort. None of them had heard her scream like_ …)  
  
“Fuck! …Oh…fuck…shit…” The sounds coming out of her mouth were drawn and he could see blood stains along the rims of her teeth as they clacked together to stifle the feeling roving around as she fell off of her table and out of his sight. Eddie didn’t like it ( _her being out of sight and screaming like that_ ) and, despite all his emotions that made him flee from the uncomfortable ( _blood, dust, dandruff, bland clothing_ ), he found that it was in his best interest to get her back into his sight by jumping from where he had been looking at her and skidding rather clumsily to the other side of the desk where she was hunched over, back raised and head to the ground. Her hair splayed out on the floor and while one arm was wrapped tight around her middle, the other arm was braced near her head to claw at the ground and leave tracks with her nails.  
  
Despite knowing that his ass would get kicked the moment the guards heard the screaming, Eddie found his hands occupying themselves with attempt at helpful movement. One hand gently ( _oh, and her black doctor’s coat felt awful—reedy and gross; like a cat that had been out on the streets for too long and couldn’t clean itself too often_ ) placed itself along the center of her back, feeling her entire body vibrate with what must have been incredible pain to make that sound; the other hand trashing through her desk when she finally blurted out something he could process (“… _my purse…drugs…cellphone…Leland…fuck-fuck-fuck!”)._   
  
“Okay, you know this really wasn’t what I was looking to get into this session, right—“  
  
“Shut the fuck up, Eddie—Oh!”   
  
Yelling at a person while they were trying to actually help when the person that was supposed to be psychoanalyzing them was in the midst of seizing pain on the floor was not a good idea, it seemed. As soon as the words left her mouth she ended up falling to her side ( _arm occupied with trapping her stomach from—Eddie couldn’t guess_ ) and undulating more painful sound than would have been liked when Eddie finally did find her purse ( _a hideous satchel carrier that looked like something a college student would carry around and he found himself flinching at more than the woman on the floor_ ).  
  
Not really knowing what he was doing ( _he would have preferred the guards to come at this point; taking a beating would be so much better than not knowing exactly what he was doing_ ), Eddie tossed the bag onto the floor and dug through it for one of the objects Harley had muttered.  
  
Gum, mini-doughnuts, cheap floral perfume, lip balm—cellphone!  
  
Mindlessly ( _he would laugh later, he just knew he would laugh hysterically_ ), his fingers pressed the call buttons to show her previous calls, all including pizza joints, a number that lived in connation to the police department, an electronics store and—success!—Doctor Leland. He pressed the number to Leland and heard the call ring send through. And all the while Harley was still screaming and he’d found his other hand placed on her shoulder ( _it seemed less likely that she would think he was attacking her if he touched her at a joint that still gave her ample opportunity to hit him back_ ).  
  
It feels a little like a night terror he’d had when he was little and still had a mother when the ringing of the phone draws out longer than he thought it could and he is actually feeling panic for someone other than himself. That is not the way he is—he can’t be anymore. He’s selfish, it’s a fact he’d accepted when he was about thirteen and realized he was smarter than almost everybody else and decided to make his living at being the way he was if it would keep him moderately safer than he could be in any other way.  
  
Understanding why he felt the slightest bit of relief when the woman on the other line picked up and said, “Hello?” was something he would put away for later in his cell. When this was done with.  
  
“Hello, Doctor Leland, it’s Edward calling.”  
  
“How did you--?”  
  
“Can we please talk about this later? I’m still in the room with Harley, but could you send the medical staff…”  
  
( _Things get fuzzy around the edges of vision if a person expends too much oxygen in one go. That is very bad_.)

* * *

 

The Penguin is vaguely aware that he should have been a little alarmed that the first thing the woman said when she woke up in an old-fashioned insane asylum bathtub in Gotham General was, “Oh, it stopped…” But couldn’t bring himself to take note of it as he set down the little history magazine he’d been reviewing over and sent Lark and Raven out of the room to go and get Selina while he approached Harley’s head ( _the only thing visible to him because the bathtub had a tarp rimmed over the top like the lid of a pickle jar so he couldn’t see her naughty bits_ ).  
  
“Yes, it appears that the somewhat mediocre medical personnel of this establishment managed to dig the piece of a needle out of your pain receptors,” Ozzie nodded, taking the only seat in the room so that he wasn’t raised so high over Harley’s head. It was impolite to do such things, even though she wasn’t much of a lady.  
  
“Oh. Is that what it was?” She asked somewhat listlessly, head swerving in a circle and then settling in a position that allowed her to look at his top hat, but not his eyes, because he didn’t seem to like that unless there was a chance someone was flirting with him.   
  
Cobblepot folded his arms and crossed one leg over the other the best he could and gave a disapproving look at how she seemed completely unaffected that she was in a tub full of ice, in a hospital and had fallen unconscious seven hours ago next to Riddler in Arkham, “Well, it wasn’t debris from when our Jaded Jester beat you with a chair three years ago, that’s for certain. Otherwise the drones here would have found them sooner.”  
  
She tried to chuckle at that, but it seemed to run aground at her attempt to do so and she had to stop, head roving in a circle again before stopping to look back at him (heh, he was worried) again.  
  
Harley really hated hospitals, but she had learned not to care about the destinations so much as the journeys.  
  
“Sooner? Where’s the fun in that Ozzie? Anything shorter than three hours and you and Selina wouldn’t show up at all.”  
  
“How do you know—“  
  
She smiled in that secretive way she often did even when she was in the jester’s uniform and interrupted him, “I’m in a vat of freezing and pain, I’m not deaf. Though I would like to know who called _you_ over here. You and Selina don’t often get along even when you want the same thing so…”  
  
“Edward called me.”  
  
She blinked at him ( _a fawn confronted by a new life form that was a butterfly_ ) and a piece of ice just above her stomach slid between two other ice cubes and into her very naked navel.   
  
He elaborated before she could question whether or not he should be reintroduced to Arkham Asylum, his flipper fingers spinning clockwise in the air next to his ear as out in the hallway three doctors rolled a gurney full of middle-aged hood ( _three nurses and a doctor on all sides twittering about Batman and a meth lab and a grade three kidney problem_ ), “He still had your cellphone before they got you out of your work space and he called me. I’m supposed to up-date him on visiting day. I can’t contact him on your phone again because they apprehended him and seized the device. Obviously.”  
  
( _Blazing pain and fire up and down her spine as well as in the general area of her abdomen…and Eddie freaking out when Leland came in, screaming at the guards who had wandered off to get some coffee_.)  
  
Harley’s toes wiggled against the porcelain, “Right, Eddie. I must have really scared him, huh?”  
  
“Infinitesimally…yes.”  
  
“Ozzie.”  
  
The large, waddling owner of the Iceberg Lounge rubbed at the very end of his nose and seemed far more sheepish than he had since the very first time she had met the man in a dive in the east end of Gotham ( _playing cards, smoking tiny little cigarettes, trash talking Professor Crane in a very civil way as he tried to find his way into being the owner of a full house_ ) when Joker had been making himself look busy, while in actuality he had been up the walls trying to think of a new plan. It was sweet in a quiet, sentimental kind of way.  
  
As sweet as it was though, she got impatient really easily when she was stuck in a hospital ( _doubtless for a week or so and with the problems of having to get up and get out every time they had to change the bloody water for more clean ice, all the while with med students and doctors storing at all of her scars and open wounds_ ) and managed to snap her fingers inside the tub. It was a tiny little click, but it got the Penguin’s attention.  
  
“He was not very pleased when he opened up your coat to see if you were injured, Harleen. I think once the others find out, you’ll have a very long explanation to give.”  
  
Dry, focused eyes finally found their way to Ozzie’s own and Harley asked in a rather no-nonsense tone that spoke volumes about not joking at all, “Find out about what, Ozzie?”  
  
( _Clicking heels on floors that bleached soaked in and disinfected daily walked smoothly and surely and reminded the individuals of the room, briefly, of a sonata in Mexico with snake tails_.)  
  
The brunette man was saved from having to go into further (painful) details by Selina stepping into the room looking very crabby, bags under her eyes, in a simple get-up of drawsting grey sweat pants and deep black T-shirt with heeled clogs, just her tiny hand purse strung over her shoulder. Her hair was in disarray ( _not a difficult thing, seeing as it was actually short and it took products by the dozen to keep the black locks from smashing every which way like a dozen and one ducktails_ ) and when she found Harley’s big blue eyes open, she hopped onto the tarped tub sides to hiss down at her friend ( _friend—not enemy and not alley of convenience like everyone thought she was_ ).  
  
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell anyone! Why didn’t you call me, or Ivy or someone who knows what an asshole Joker is to come and get you?”  
  
Harley didn’t answer; she just rolled her head in a circle again, before wiggling it through the hole in the tarp like a rat so she couldn’t be seen anymore once her head disappeared under. The Penguin and Catwoman were left facing a hole in the tarp with just a few strands of Harley’s hair sticking out like some of Ivy’s specialized Creeper Vines she housed in hideouts around town.  
  
“I didn’t _want_ to talk about it…”  
  
( _They hadn’t known about anything, hadn’t really taken Eddie’s words into consideration until Selina had snuck down to where the surgeons kept their boards to keep check of the operations of the day and found that leading away from Harley’s name were the words “Partial Hysterectomy/Full Preeclampsia Work Up /Retraction of Placenta Residue/Debris Collection & Cleaning/Stabbing...” and it just went on from there. At which point Selina had a shit fit and told Bruce to “Stay the fuck away” until further notice. Unless he was willing to help her find a way to bust Joker out of Arkham so she could kill him in some justifiably delicious way_.)

 


	33. So Little, So Little

_-:-_  
I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday.  
-Eeyore, “We Say Good-bye,” Winnie the Pooh.

* * *

 

  
It was apparent that all of the inmates of Arkham ( _that had ever had anything to do with Harley_ _ **at all**_ ) wanted to do something about the knowledge circulating that had them all pretty angry. They all wanted to actually do something _physical_ and _horrible_ to the man responsible for such a thing none of them would ever have considered before. Even criminals such as themselves had standards and the Joker—worst of the worst—had violated those standards and all of them were rallying to do something within all of their powers about it.  
  
But they were too scared. After all, all over the world, among villains that were not from Gotham, it was said that when they needed something to warn themselves off from something stupid, they told Joker Stories. That said a lot.  
  
They wanted to help, for once and their lives, but were impotent to do anything at all. Irony in the darkest sense of the word.

* * *

 

“Go away.”  
  
An hour out of the hospital and Harley thought ( _thought with beams of rainbows on the end and angels singing in an amp theater like a gathering of Hendrix fans_ ) it was safe to stop at the park, sit down on a bench and enjoy the freezing cold caressing her coat and skin of her face before she had to be off to pick up her babies from Joan ( _sweet of her to offer to watch them, seeing as Harley knew her colleague’s neighbors were less than thrilled—none more so than the woman that lived two floors down with a set of Welsh Corgis that Bud and Lou had tried to chase like sheep_ ). But, rather than experiencing the peace that could be brought—never mind that she had been in a freezing cold bathtub for seven days with doctors swarming around her, bickering about her condition when none of them knew dick about how to treat all the symptoms that came with her case and her body as a whole lot of scewiness—with fresh air and the great outdoors, she had to be interrupted.  
  
Commissioner Gordon, in his trench coat and that bang of hair of his standing up to waver in the cold breeze, rolled his eyes lightly, but continued to hold the bushel of Snowdrops and violets he had bought an hour ago ( _a card was tucked into them with her name on it and his handwriting standing out in print, not cursive_ ) and sit at the far end of the bench. He would not put himself within distance and proximity to touch her, because he knew better (he was ancient in her opinion, so at least he’d learned something from his years on the GCPD), but he wanted to be close enough to get up and follow her if she decided to stalk off and hide.   
  
He sighed good naturedly in a way that perhaps only he could do around someone like her who had both been a person and a criminal at one time and looked over at her; her eyes closed and very little red along her cheeks that was the body’s way of saying to the world that it was heating up, that it was healthy. It was disconcerting that she seemed no longer to possess such capabilities ( _Renee had told him, after visiting Harley on her own day off and finding her asleep with her head poking out of her bathtub full of ice that she didn’t even shiver when her core temperature was especially low; the Latina detective had seemed guilty about something, but Jim hadn’t asked_ ), but from what Batman and Catwoman and everyone had let out in information and hissed about in the last week, it really wasn’t a surprise, so he leveled his expression and spoke up.  
  
“Not now, Dr. Quinzel. I’d like to talk to you first. If you’d indulge me, I’d be most grateful.”  
  
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t get up and walk away while sneering at him, so he fished before continuing his line of speech.  
  
“Think of it as an early Christmas gift instead of the obvious,” the flowers moved from his leather gloved hands to her own bare hands, her eyes opening to glance at them and hold them but make no comment on them at all—perhaps Ivy had truly rubbed off on her and he should have bought a potted set, but she didn’t throw them into the trashcan sitting pathetically close to the bench with a few napkins scattered around it, so he let up enough to be grateful for that, “You know, add some color to your apartment.”  
  
“My apartment is fucking fabulous,” she snapped, hand tightening around the bouquet, but he knew enough about her to figure that she wasn’t going to hit him with it; she would just turn her head to finally look at him and glare ( _the scratches around her left cheek from when she’d fallen onto the pieces of her own broken teapot in nerve pain more prominent in the light under the winter cloud covered sun, giving her the image of some pretty China doll that had fallen from the shelf and been cracked but put back together with minimal effort_ ).  
“Not that you would know that, considering you’ve never been there, and never will be,” she muttered, uncrossing her legs and setting them apart in a rather improper fashion for a woman, “Unless I get arrested or call to be saved from being murdered or something.”  
  
Harvey was right, her sense of self-deprecating humor was still very much on par with her new lifestyle. Gordon still didn’t know how the bloated, less than wonderful detective could possibly know that ( _in previous years before, his only thoughts on the clown girl had revolved around Joker and how she could possibly bring herself to sleep with someone who was potentially toxic during sex; but recently had become more acutely aware than she was unexpectedly interesting in her own right and without attachments that the public focused on_ ) but tossed the thought away with crossing one leg over the other and trying to make himself as comfortable as Harley looked in the weather around them that was—for days—bordering on well below zero.  
  
“Well, from what I saw at your office on my last visit to bring in Two-Face, I’d believe that.”  
  
Silence walked around them for a few moments, Harley’s eyes drifting closed and Gordon’s skin flinching inside his coat every time a wind gusted around their feet and made let snow waves and circles.  
  
Looking at her he couldn’t help but finally speak up, “Batman’s been worried about you. We all are, but him especially. He keeps trying to find the mob doctor you used those six weeks you were missing.”  
  
She flinched as though she’d been stung by a bee, but her eyes stayed closed and he could see her pulse beat along the veins of her throat when she swallowed either saliva or more oxygen, sharp fingernails (paint from them gone so the doctors at the hospital could see if she had any more deformities that came with her being a sort of live-in girlfriend/guinea pig for seven years of her life) digging into the stems of the offered flowers, “I’d tell him not to bother, but I doubt he’d listen.”  
  
“I think if you asked, he’d respect your wishes.”  
  
“No he wouldn’t.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Ooh, let me think,” she snarked, eyes ice blue and cold as the weather as she looked over at him and he had to brace himself because the look on her continence was not particularly friendly; like the days she’d held herself up on a pedestal just to make Joker happy and was willing to endure insult after insult with a grin and white paint that barely covered bruises inflicted by the man, “Maybe because he’s been irreparably damaged by trauma, and I’ve been irreparably damaged by trauma and since he’s lived with it for years longer than I have, he thinks he knows best and is doing what he believes to be my own best interests? Or maybe because he still thinks I’m that bubbling idiot who he only knew _after_ I listened to the biggest liar on the planet? Or maybe he thinks that talking about my situation will somehow make things better? Like reliving getting carved open won’t bring back a lot more than I’m willing to put up with right now.”  
  
The commissioner would have been much better off, maybe, if he hadn’t uncrossed his legs and brought up his hands to illustrate his point to the woman who had—he would later realize, much later and much more put out then he thought he ever could be while visiting the woman who was still beautiful but no longer innocent in anyway—probably already thought up an answer to everything he could have said.  
  
“He knows your interests.”  
  
“No, he doesn’t. He thinks he does—and so do you—but you don’t. All you know are the interests of the stupid, stupid woman who let a monster tie a rope around her neck and then was surprised when he pushed her hard enough to fall.”  
  
Her grip on the flowers wasn’t any tighter, even as he could see how painful it was when she set her jaw and her left pointer finger was digging into her thumb hard enough to draw blood; the red dripping onto the end of two of the green stems. Her control was terrifying, but he wasn’t going to back down. He’d made up his mind about talking to the woman the day before when his daughter had commented on the case and looked like she was going to cry for a woman she didn’t know.  
  
“Hard enough to fall and lose a baby?”  
  
( _Above their heads, about a mile to the left of the eye, two large black crows passed over a small group of pigeons in the colors of grey sleight and black engine exhaust. Two seemingly macabre figures completely uninterested in what could have been an opportunity to get an easy meal if they just dived down into the cluster of stupid creatures and chased one towards a window where it would assume an escape was available, but was instead met with a thick sheet of glass that would break its neck like a toothpick and send it to the sidewalk below.)_  
  
Jim could see, very quiet and almost selfishly, something in the woman churn and dissolve just along the corners of her eyes where she kept everything back almost as well as the entire Batclan. If she had been wearing a mask and lenses on her eyes, he wouldn’t have been able to see her reaction at all; seeing as she was without the shield to herself, she made off quite well, even to the commissioner.  
  
Her black coat suddenly made him uncomfortable as she rose from her seat and slid the flowers into the crook of her arm (that image itself making him sick inside and sad in a completely crazy way that he would never explain, ever), looking down at him straight faced, but no light in her eyes like she used to have in a full body suit of red-white-black-diamonds-cone-hat-sledge hammer-crazy-crazy, and spoke clearly as she turned on her heel and walked away towards the place she had been heading, “I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me that. Tell B-Man to fuck off; my mob doctor isn’t in town, anyway. Thanks for the flowers.”  
  
Jim Gordon was left sitting in the cold on the bench, his glassed pinching his nose like they often did when he felt a defeat.  
  
( _He wouldn’t ever know that Harley took the flowers back to her apartment after picking up Bud and Lou and hung them upside-down on a hook above her bathroom mirror_.)

* * *

 

It was extremely unusual that any of the doctors would let Jervis near something potentially sharp, but since things had gotten quite hectic and out of control that week ( _Joker had tried to get out into Gotham, but, oddly, had not made it past the first cell-block and an hour later the guards had found him beaten pretty badly and stuffed into solitary confinement; a concussion suffered to his head hard enough that the back of his head was bleeding and four nurse aides had to cut him out of an altered straightjacket to find both his arms broken in several places that would take months and months to heal properly_ ), Bartholomew had allowed him to be guarded in a room with a broken teapot and some non-seeping/nontoxic adhesive to glue them back together. Joan and her interns ( _her interns until Harley got back; all of them chomping at the bit after being allowed to interview some of the Rogues and eager to discuss their cases with the only doctor who would actually know if their assumptions of them were correct in the least_ ) had gone over them a day before and washed off all the blood, so he was less likely to freak out while looking over every piece and then start crying.  
  
It wasn’t much, but he seemed happy to do it when Eddie told him to ask Bartholomew for the favor.

 


	34. Hushed Prying

_-:-_  
Different denotes neither bad nor good, but it certainly means 'not the same'!  
-Alice: Return to Madness

* * *

 

  
_Experiencing surgery, when sedatives and anesthetics don’t work worth a damn and the trauma is much too severe for a mere mob doctor to handle all by himself in a tiny room just barely sterile enough to attempt to get the job done, sucks. Being delirious at the time doesn’t really help, either. In fact, it makes everything so bad that the mob doctor often has to strap the person down—wrists and ankles and sometimes put the patient in a neck brace to prevent them from snapping their own skull and spine on the edge of the table—and gag them so he can concentrate._   
  
_Improvisation is key to surgery of this nature. Corners get cut and tucked where they’re not supposed to, blood runs the risk of being contaminated when replaced with stuff fresh from plastic packages stolen from clinics, often the patient is lucky if they can even walk afterwards, but the job is done and sometimes things go better than they would have in a hospital._   
  
_Harley, mercifully, didn’t remember the very beginning of being under her private mob doctor’s scalpel and syringe, but she was excruciatingly conscious when he tucked and buffed and sewed the hell out of her abdomen. She noticed all the mistakes the doctor had made that would have killed a normal woman, but left her better off because it was either the doctor criss-crossed some of the skin and placenta and uterus to replace what had been gutted out of her with a dirty pair of knives and Joker’s own hands (slithering inside her for just long enough to grab something that he thought was an ovary or a small intestine and pulled hard), or she would have a giant hole where her belly used to be. Or she would die, but that was the same difference._   
  
_After her mob doctor had pulled one end of her torn placenta over to use as a quick fix band-aid for her uterus, blue eyes had rolled into white and the blonde had passed out and woken up who knew how much later in a bed that was about the same size as that of a movie star—big and roomy and covered top to bottom in bleach smelling comforters and sheets and covers. The mob doctor had been in the other room talking to an ally on the phone and hadn’t noticed small fingers (nails missing from two of them, right down to the quick so she could feel the air pass over them) trail like half-dead caterpillars over the lump of white gauze and bandages that was her stomach for weeks and weeks until she could stand on her own and walk into Arkham in a shirt that covered a dirty emotional secret that would be hidden away for almost two years. She didn’t even feel her fingers or the flesh under the gauze; she just felt hollow before she fell asleep and stayed that way for more time._

* * *

 

Flowers were getting more expensive and the papers used to cover them up from the cold were recycled so much that Jack thought he could eat them without ailment, but it was worth the trouble if it would get his alter to shut up and stop whispering love ballads in the back of his mind.   
  
The hallway leading into the building really wasn’t that difficult to get into. Getting past the electronic door just required him to bluff his way through talking with the resident to whoever lived just above Dr. Quinzel’s apartment, asking to be buzzed in because he had been called over to exterminate some rats that were infesting the building and the landlord wouldn’t answer his phone. The girl who answered ( _the sticker for the buzzer read ‘Brown, Stephanie’ and had minor water damage from previous rainstorms and ice that had slithered down onto it the week before when there had been a rise and then fall in temperature in just three hours)_ was more than happy to let him in if it meant she wouldn’t see a rat skitter across her living room floor; he stepped in once she squeaked at the mention of the rodents and he was home free (much to his own deep regret and Creeper’s delight).  
  
The reporter adjusted a button he could reach at the neck of his shirt over the top of his brown trench coat, loosening it to save him the trouble of sweating at the sudden onrush of dry heat that came at him from vents put into the sides of the halls and on each landing, eyes straying absently towards the shadows that the lights outside of the doors cast. He thought, perhaps, the building was familiar in some way as he moved up the stairs and had to blink back the feeling of walking into a dragon’s lair (all the more realistic because the sickly yellow lighting made the floors seem as if they were made of quicksand and the moors straight from Hound of the Baskervilles, and the heat made him think of Turkish bathhouses he’d sometimes spent time in overseas during deep undercover journalism having to do with sexual slavery and drug running), but that wasn’t uncommon as the side of town the building stood in was a key district for most of the material he made his living uncovering. They all tended to blur together after a while, frottaged out of his mind’s eye by far more important things—like remembering the ticket to pickup his dry cleaning so the bastard that ran the Laundromat didn’t try and keep his deposit.  
  
Jack passed by two apartments with doors half open and smoke or music pouring out into the halls and up to the rooftop doors, walking more quickly away from the door with music coming out; the teenage boy sitting in his own apartment playing guitar while half sobbing and only covered in black boxers and a rather feminine black kimono shift not at all one of the things that Jack wanted to witness when he was trying with all his might to keep his nerve while keeping Creeper in check.  
  
{“ **Oh my, this is quite the place to hang the hat. Maybe we should rent out and see if there’s anything fun that goes down** …”}  
  
He hopped the rest of the steps and was glad to find the door he had been looking for, stepping right over and knocking almost hurriedly so he could get away from the sounds of the teenager sobbing even more than singing—and badly, he might have added had a muffled animal sound come out from under the bottom of the door, shuffling beyond that Jack just knew was one of the exotic animals Dr. Quinzel owned.  
  
He stopped knocking when something beyond the door hit the floor and rolled, steps headed toward the door stopping just before he blinked and was suddenly facing the blonde bombshell that Creeper adored like the Tramp lured to the Lady, but whom Jack thought of as rather a high risk person to be around even well after he’d interviewed her at the Iceberg and seeing her in a dress.   
  
She didn’t looked pleased to see him and he could smell mulled wine and spicy sugar from beyond her open threshold, but when she opened her mouth to say something—{“ **Yeah, come on baby, light my fire**!”}—perhaps more biting than anything Jack would ever hear in the Watchtower while Creeper was in control and he was just a bystander in his own body and consciousness, she was cut only rudely by the teen downstairs upping his volume and clearing his voice just enough to enunciate a line from the song he was singing. Harley’s blue eyes rolled over in her head as her head was smacked by her hand at the awful noise; obviously having heard it before.  
  
“ _Do you be-lieve in life after love? I can feel some—thing inside me say ‘I really don’t think I’m strong enough’ oh-no_ …”  
  
She rubbed her temples for a moment before looking back up at Jack and, surprisingly to the reporter as he had expected something very much different ( _it was already different from last time as she wasn’t wearing a dress and was instead in—thankfully fresh looking—a black thong and an extra large grey and pink T-shirt with an image of a woman’s legs from the knees down in hospital bed leg braces, the toes covered in purple nail polish and the words Vagina Monologues splayed out over where Harley’s cleavage would be more apparent if she were wearing a bra_ ), seemed happy to spot the yellow and white daisies in his hand he had bought before coming to her apartment. She reached out easily and snatched them from his hand, walking down the way he had come while Bud and Lou stood in the doorway looking at the reporter curiously, but not moving to follow the former hench wench as she called back over her shoulder at Jack, “Thanks for these, I’ll be right back.”  
  
Jack blinked at first at the hyenas and then turned from the door to brace his hands on the railing of the staircase, following Harley as she walked right up to the door the teenager could be heard and seen from, Creeper annoying him in wailing out like the Looney Toon skunk after the poor kitty he stalked, {“ **Don’t just stand here man! Go fetch her before she becomes trapped by the dying lark!”}** and Lou turning back into the apartment to pick up the heavy, clear glass crystal ball Harley used to play with in her hand to keep up dexterity; the hyena’s teeth picked up the object like an egg and he gently set it back in its holder on the table.  
  
The reporter that Gotham seemed to enjoy even more after the incident with the Joker and the chemical bath, leaned over the railing even more as Harley opened the door to the teen’s apartment without knocking and without much cause to think of her own modesty.  
  
He couldn’t hear much of what she said aside from the words “Shut up, Jason” and “you know you shouldn’t be smoking,” but he did see her disappear beyond his own vision to walk into what must have been the boy’s kitchen or something and bring back, a moment later, a blue vase filled with a little water as well as a pair of jeans. She tossed the jeans over the teen’s lap before unwrapping the flowers with ease from their holding within the recycled papers and setting them into the vase on the boy’s low coffee table with the cigarette in its ashtray nearby; Harley moving one hand to put the cigarette out as “Jason” still looked miserable even with her being in almost as little clothing as he was.  
  
Jack didn’t so much hear as he saw Harley say something quietly to Jason with a bit of pity in her stance and a pat on the top of his messy black mop of hair, perhaps saying something to do with using the flowers for something, because the boy looked a little less miserable as he grabbed for his jeans and wiped at his nose. She was walking out of the lower level apartment without another word and shut the door to walk back up to her own floor, Jack awaiting not with bated breath, but with a peaceful mind as Creeper seemed a little happy that the blonde hadn’t done anything that would get the yellow being hot under the color and riled up like a dog.  
  
With coming back to face Jack, Harley didn’t seem as likely to yell at him as she had when she opened her door; Bud turning away from both people to get his seat back at the couch, assured that Jack wasn’t going to do anything as far as the animal could tell.   
  
She was quiet for a moment, which was fine with Jack as he didn’t really know what to say himself even if he had gone out of his way to visit her on his day off, but after a moment she sighed and walked into her living room and then out of his sight into the kitchen, eye catching his for only as long as it took for a hawk to spot a rabbit in an open field, before calling over her shoulder for the second time, “Wipe your feet before you shut the door. I’ve got some cookies baking, but you don’t get to touch my wine until I decide whether or not you’re worth the company.”  
  
{“ **Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! My love awaits!”}**  
  
While Creeper’s happiness was almost infectious, Jack reminded himself that an invite in for cookies didn’t mean anything when he still hadn’t stated why he was in her apartment building and had intended to give her those flowers. He smiled lightly as Creeper continued to celebrate, but otherwise, just did as Harley asked with brushing his shoes over her mat before shutting the door. He didn’t touch the lock when Lou—Bud?—noticed Jack’s hand going for it and made a dark sound that, according to National Geographic, was a warning.

 


	35. Finite

_-:-_  
And sometimes you have to take your "I love you" whichever way it comes.  
-2 Broke Girls.

* * *

 

  
He seemed far more awkward than Joan thought he had ever had the ability to be. She had accidentally seen him half naked in his cell the other night while he was changing into a fresh set of prison clothing and quite relaxed in what he thought was his solitude. When he’d seen her eyeing him on her rounds with the gaggle of interns she was watching over ( _Harley’s day off and they were all Leland’s; it was Jeremiah’s ruling for it to be so_ ) he had stiffened as much as he did sitting in front of her with eyes downcast and his hands fiddling with the cuffs of his clothing. It seemed he was trying to pluck up the courage to say something.  
  
“Edward?” Joan asked, setting down her cup of tea ( _fresh from the teapot newly fixed and with cracks barely visible to the naked eye that Harley had started letting her use when the blonde was on a day off, or just in general because that horrid stuff Jervis insisted Harley drink—for her health—was becoming a fixture in the asylum that Joan felt inclined to drink, despite the way it made her face squinch at all the right angles_ ) so she could get Eddie to look up at her own curiosity.  
  
“I’ve been thinking lately,” Eddie finally spoke, his usual pompousness being put away for later as he did look up at Dr. Leland, one finger tapping twice on the coffee table before him as he went on, “Maybe…maybe I should really start trying to get better.”  
  
Happy as the words made Joan, her facial features didn’t move and she just nodded her head, “Oh. I’m glad to hear that. Would it be too personal to ask your reasons why?”  
  
“No reason,” Edward shrugged, that false smile turning up enough that Joan could make out the answer in his eyes as they moved from her own figure to the two newest additions of art Joan had added to her office walls ( _Harley’s rescued erotica, only not; the visage in one piece showcasing a young nymph with sapphire eyes and crabs used as hair fixtures for her yellow locks as she laid flat against an iceberg, one nipple black against the colors of the water at her toes and the other nipple occupied with feeding a baby otter held in both hands like the most precious thing in the world. In the frame just an inch below it, it’s upper left corner almost touching the frame of the sea creatures, was the figure of a naked Minotaur; his figure lean as it sat in the center of his labyrinth in a sort of shadow of light, one horn cracked right down to the base of his skull, his shins and arms bloody from a fight and eyes glancing up towards the nymph in the frame above—as if the two pieces were meant to be together rather than by themselves_ ).

* * *

 

{“ **You shouldn’t be staring**.”}  
  
“Oh, hush. I’m not so much of a Philistine to simply stare at a woman. I am **admiring** , Jackie.”  
  
The connection between personalities of the Creeper and Jack Ryder were not known among their fellow vigilantes or even the people in the Justice League that bothered to get anywhere near the yellow skinned loon. True, the Question had his suspicions, but he never actually asked or pointed them out.  
  
But that didn’t matter for the moment. What mattered was that after that horrible fight with second rate mobsters and henchmen that thought they might be able to sweeten a deal with employers with a little favor ( _well, horrible for them and a little bad for their intended victim, but nothing Creeper couldn’t just shrug off with a laugh, a caper and a kick like a donkey_ ), the Creeper was finally getting a proper look from his own perspective at the lady he had both dragged away from a rather nasty chance of a fight that could’ve landed her in a hospital (for the second time that month) and had quite the crush on since his zaniness had come into being through a rather violent birth.  
  
Her coat was held in his arms and quite damaged, and she huffed and hissed like a cat while she walked around the apartment he had dragged her to ( _Jack had screamed and given Creeper a bit of a headache when he realized it was Ryder’s own home and Creeper had simply tuned him out by humming “I kissed a girl and I liked it…”)_ so she could put on a T-shirt to replace the blouse a stupid-foolish-wretched thug had torn off of her ( _buttons gone and littering the ground in a back alley like a simple collection of rocks and broken glass, threads and the blouse itself also left on the ground with a little blood on the tatters_ ) in a scuffle she’d wanted no part of from what he could tell when he’d wandered across a building and then launched himself in to help her get away.   
  
Despite Jack’s opinion, Creeper thought Harley was quite pretty. True, she was only clothed in torn pants and her shoes now, but that wasn’t what he meant.   
  
He followed her into his own living room and watched her go through the laundry basket full of shirts Jack had cleaned just that morning; Creeper privately memorizing how her breasts were smaller than they had been in her jester’s suit because they had been slashed at with knives a long time ago and then had healed with layers of scar tissue, turning them from C-cups to just big enough to hold in the hand. He counted the scars along her back as well as the fresh wounds as old as four months or young as three days that seemed to dance along patches of skin that took on the colors of shadow and old fruit in convenience stores, losing count around twenty. Creeper noticed that she didn’t appear to care when he looked at her front; Harley’s ribs easy to count in tandem to the multitudes of lined white and pink tiny scars that seemed to try and make the one big sign of trauma that was her abdomen seem less horrible than it was ( _which didn’t work; her belly-button was still there, but was offset and twisted wide and horrible by the engorged purple and sucking red of where numerous surgeries had taken place to contain the damage made by the hands of the madman that had, in a way, created both of the two in the living room_ ).  
  
When Harley finally picked out a shirt and pulled it easily over her head ( _little chunks of hair getting caught underneath and flying free when her head emerged from the opening in the top),_ Creeper was a little disappointed that it was one of Jack’s extra-large black jerseys with the bottom fraying and the added memory of it being a leave-behind of one of Jack’s girlfriends ( _that always dumped him for his personality or for talking to himself; one or the other_ ). He just continued to smile, dreamy and completely happy in her presence.  
  
“Were you saying something?”  
  
“No beautiful, I was singing something,” Creeper stated pleasantly, tossing her coat onto the hook drilled into the front door, its tag catching on the metal and the rest of its black bulk sagging towards the floor and allowing the unsightly tears to become even more obvious along the arms where she’d defended herself and along the area that covered her left leg; one whole pocket flopped down and open and torn from a dulled pocket knife, “I was trying to think of a song that would forever allow me to remember getting to fight beside you.”  
  
{“ **Oh my God, please stop talking** …”} Jack moaned from inside Creeper, Harley making a face to echo that train of thought.  
  
“Your flirtation tactics suck, you know that?” Harley stated, getting up from sitting in an armchair that was a strange custard yellow Jack had felt obliged to purchase after Creeper had accidentally broken its predecessor, dusting off her knees and moving for the door. She really had no intention of staying in a painfully normal apartment with a guy that had stalked her every chance he got when she still wore facepaint and carried around a hammer. She raised a sleek brow when he capered around her ( _danced in a way, like a male ballerina and that ridiculous red boa following him as well as a tail_ ) but didn’t try to stop her as she grabbed her coat—oh, and that would be just a bitch to fix in time for work in a couple days—and hid herself inside of it like a caterpillar inside its cocoon.  
  
Creeper resented the thought ( _no doubt Jack’s, even if he was being a little quiet for the moment_ ) of her being a caterpillar when he—much to the chagrin of Batman and Robin and every other hero who knew about his personalities and his intentions—knew she had already escaped that form to become something else entirely. She was a rather torn and bloodied butterfly and as such she was a lady and he opened the door for her when she made to turn the knob with the hand that had a single, deep slash from a broken bottle used as a weapon.  
  
She stepped out first and when he followed ( _she knew he would; it was too much to hope otherwise_ ), he locked the door from the inside, bounded forward and walked along the railing of the staircase she descended, one step at a time and slowly in the two-inch heels she’d borrowed from Joan that still made her rather uncomfortable when she intended to go to the Iceberg Lounge for a drink by herself ( _not looking for trouble, but it did find her when she was leaving that night after a couple shots of Black Maria and Fire Yang that left her warm, but never drunk_ ).  
  
They were on the fourteenth floor of the building, so he had a little time until she walked off into the night with the hope of (he believed she had) never seeing him again.  
  
“Well, what flirtations would you like me to use, pretty girl?”  
  
When he caterwauled over to the next banister and she continued mostly just trying not to fall down the stairs and break her neck, Harley sighed and reached down to remove her shoes. Chances were the stairs of the particular building they were in would not hold little dangers of glass or syringe needles, so she could carry them down the rest of the way and give her ( _perfect, Creeper thought, eyeing nail polish indigo and not bad at all_ ) feet some breathing room.  
  
Creeper surprised her again when both her shoes were off and he took them away, stuffing them into his boa and apparently not going to give them back until she reached the end of the building or answered his question.  
  
She resisted sticking her tongue out at him and answered, stern and point blank, but not unkind, “Anything without words. Just _existing_ works fine for most people and I’m jot horribly picky these days.”  
  
“I’m not a choice of fries or salad, honey; I’m your knight in brilliant green and red!” Creeper laughed, spinning in the air once before hanging off of another level of the stairs by his feet so he was looking down at her as she rolled her eyes and kept going; her toes never turning red with collected blood when she pressed both feet hard to the concrete, remaining white against the color of her nails.  
  
“And I’m not a dessert,” Harley responded evenly, blue eyes watching his grip when he set onto another level and sat to wait for her, catlike on the railing and doglike in patience that she really just didn’t get, “So you can stop calling me honey, or cookie, or sweet-heart or whatever else I’m sure you call me in your dreams.”  
  
Creeper gasped theatrically at her, hands wringing before him and eyes bright, “You know about the dreams!”  
  
That got a little smile out of her. It was fleeting, but it existed.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to put this here, but then, it's sequel really shouldn't stand here all by itself.


End file.
